My SharePoint Saturday IT PRO Session: Dodge the Bullet (with video)

25/01/2012 update
After what has been far too long since SPSUK, I have finally uploaded the slides for this session. They are available on slideshare. Enjoy!

Last Saturday I had the great pleasure of attending SharePoint Saturday UK 2011, organised by Tony Pounder, Mark Macrae (both from Intelligent Decisioning) and Brett Lonsdale (from Lightning Tools). I think everyone who attended agreed that the day was a huge success – a friend of mine commented on how welcoming and friendly we are as a community which was great to hear (he isn’t a SharePoint person, although he is coming around to the idea of learning itJ). Sometimes I take this fact for granted and it’s good to be reminded of how tight-knit we are.

I think Todd Klindt deserves a big shout out, as he flew over from the US to deliver a thought provoking keynote and an awesome session on PowerShell (oh, and he’s a nice guy). I also met Anders Rask who presented a compelling set of reasons to use Web Templates which – as someone who is a little wary of Visual Studio – I just about managed to graspJ. Paul Grimley rounded off my day with a comprehensive set of considerations for global SharePoint deployments – Paul’s discussion around performance over the WAN was particularly interesting.

I was lucky enough to be offered the opportunity to speak on the day which – whilst a little nerve wracking – proved to be every bit as exciting as I had hoped.

The session title was “Dodge the bullet: 10 ways to avoid common SharePoint administration mistakes” and the Twitter hashtag was #SPSUK08.

  • Watch the session: my good friend Ash recorded the majority of the session on his phone.
  • Slides: will be posted at some point this week once I have tidied up the accompanying notes.

If you were in the session – and even if you weren’t – please feel free to post any questions or feedback you might have.

I received several great queries from the audience, and while I tried to answer them as best I could during the 60 minute session, I may follow up on over the next few weeks:

  1. Will our environment start creaking before we hit the prescribed Web app limits?
  2. What should the SQL server recovery model be set to on a development environment?
  3. Are host-named site collections equivalent to host headers at the IIS site level?

The questions above are paraphrased so if I’m off the mark please let me know.

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