SharePoint Saturday – Killer content, free to the public
Michael Lotter is developing a concept I really like: a free, day long SharePoint Community Event, SharePoint Saturday. The first one is in Virginia Beach, VA on January 10 where I will be speaking along with Joel Oleson, Todd Bleeker, Paul Galvin, Becky Isserman, Dux Raymond Sy and over a dozen other presenters.
That sounds pretty good to me, kind of like a SharePoint traveling roadshow. It’s free and open to the public as long as you register in advance.
When you think about how much it costs to go to a SharePoint convention, this just might be the deal of the year, worth some of your travel budget.
“Join SharePoint architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for ‘SharePoint Saturday’, on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at the ATC in Virginia Beach, VA. SharePoint Saturday will be an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics. SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint!”
Wow, and it’s local for me too :)
This is a good idea that I hope is repeated in Texas.
Tom – The event is getting larger by the day. There’s one in New York City in February and Becky is sponsoring one in Kansas City.
What’s your support group like where you are? Could you generate a couple hundred people for an event like this?
Tom – Just saw your twitter asking about EventBrite. I use them for all the events at EndUserSharePoint.com. I’ve had a really positive experience with them, including instant receipt of payment through PayPal and Google for numerous paid events.
I did have a problem when I had over 500 registrations for one event. The bulk emailer they provide couldn’t send out more than 499 emails. I reported this to support and received a quick response and apology, kind of nice to receive in a situation like this. They checked and couldn’t find a problem, but I’m still hesitant on very large events.
The upside to the service is the ability to create free events for no cost.
Very nice service. Highly recommended.
Mark
Mark,
Our monthly meetings are averaging 20 with a high much more than that, so I don’t think 100 would be a stretch with the quality of content Virginia has.
Eventbrite looks good for the event registration. Thanks for the input. I’m curious to see how the html embedding works on our WSS site.
-Tom
The embed from EventBrite will work great in WSS. Use the Content Editor Web Part.
The only problem you might have is if you are running a secure site, you’ll get a security warning everytime the page loads because you’ll be pulling content from an external source.
Be great if there was a webcast to tune into!
Mick – You know me… I’m already working on it. Have a good holiday. — Mark