Conferences and the Twitter Phenomenon #SPCONN09
At the SharePoint Conference a few weeks ago in Las Vegas I found Twitter to be a very cool tool during the show. I really like it from two perspectives: the presenter & the attendee. From the attendee’s perspective… When you’re attending a session you post messages in Twitter and include a hashtag that includes the session number. This message can be an open question, feedback on what is going on in the session or letting others know how things are going in the session. This is great for attendees that are attending the session as you can have a complete dialog dur

SharePoint 2010 Changes in Rendering
In SharePoint 2007 many customers provided lots of feedback to Microsoft… ok, they complained… that the markup generated by SharePoint 2007 (which also meant WSS 3.0 & ASP.NET 2.0) was not clean, concise or friendly to accessibility requirements. What’s new in the SharePoint 2010 generated markup story… Microsoft heard this loud and clear and committed to have SharePoint 2010 generate WCAG 2.0 AA complaint markup. However you may seen or heard in various places, even from a Microsoft person, in a blog or in some news report, that SharePoint is also generating XHTML 2.0 Strict markup… that is not true. The product team has n

Upgrading a SharePoint 2007 Publishing Site Master Page to SharePoint 2010
At the SharePoint Conference in Vegas two weeks ago I co-presented a session with Chris Johnson from Microsoft on how to upgrade a SharePoint 2007 Publishing site to SharePoint Server 2010. We covered some pre-upgrade stuff, things to watch out for, but what I think was likely the most interesting piece of the whole session was when we took a content DB backup of a 2007 site, restored it and added it to SharePoint 2010 (using a similar process I wrote about previously) and then modified created a new master page

Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig?
Over the last year I’ve been working with SharePoint 2010 in various ways. With the new requirements of x64 hardware in this release, I got a lot of questions at the SharePoint Conference, on Twitter and via my blog on what hardware I use to do my SharePoint 2010 development & demos. Here it goes... hopefully this helps someone else out there. The setup… First, let’s get on the same page: SharePoint 2010 *requires* a 64-bit operating system in Windows Server 2008. For the majority of us you’ll want to virtualize it. These virtual machines, at least today in beta 2, really want at least 4GB of RAM allocated to

Top session at SharePoint Conference 2009
Two weeks ago I presented two breakout sessions & a full-day post conference workshop at the SharePoint Conference. Before the show Microsoft setup a little contest for the top speakers for Microsoft & non-Microsoft speakers. I’m sure this was to incentivize many speakers to do the best they could do as this was a big coming out party for SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft wanted to put on a great show (that they did). While creating a session for a conference is a lot of work, presenting to a big group of people who are interested in learning something new is a lot of fun for me. In all three of my sessions I had a blast