SharePoint Conference 2011

SPC11!

Microsoft offered our company 1 ticket to the SharePoint conference in Anaheim, CA this year, of course I couldn't turn that down. This was my first trip to a SharePoint conference and it was a great experience. I am already looking forward to going next year. Vegas baby!

While on the way I checked in on FourSquare to my local airport and tweeted it with the #SPC11 hash tag. Within a couple of minutes I got a reply from Laura Rogers @wonderlaura who was also heading to the conference. Come to find out Laura along with Lori Gowin @lorigowin help organize the local SharePoint users group that I didn't even know existed. @bhamspug http://www.sharepointbham.org/default.aspx

There were so many great sessions offered by Microsoft, MVP's, and vendors. There were numerous times where there were 2 or 3 sessions going on at the same time. I wish I could have cloned myself so I could attend all of them. At least the slide decks are available online, and video's if they were recorded.

One of the highlights of my trip was during the keynote address. There were 2 SharePoint 2010 Azure farms on stage. The farms were mirrored and clustered for redundancy. They had 14TB of data, with over 1.8M docs and were performing a live load test on the system with over 7500 concurrent users. Not that interesting you may say, but just wait. That is when a guy came out from back stage and pulled the network cable on the primary farm. Within 15 seconds traffic was starting to be redirected to the other farm, and within 40 sec all 7500+ users were on the backup farm. Now that is pretty impressive, and got a lot of applause from the crowd.

The 2 farms

Overall it was a great trip, and I met a lot of great people. If you have ever thought about attending I highly recommend it. Maybe I will even see you there next year!