The First Arabic SharePoint Session Ever at SharePoint Saturday, Acknowledgments

Guest Author: Ayman El-Hattab

And the SharePoint community continues to prove its uniqueness and awesomeness.

This weekend, at SharePoint Saturday EMEA, I conducted the first ever Arabic SharePoint Saturday session. The session was first scheduled for 9:00 AM GMT+0, but due to some technical reasons (the Hyper-V server hosting my virtual machine had some connectivity issues), it was rescheduled to 11:00 AM. That really depressed me and I expected to have less attendees than the other session running in parallel but I was impressed to see that the number was not affected and the attendees exceeded what I anticipated.

I can still recall the first time I recorded a session from the Egypt SharePoint User Group, June 2009 meeting and made it accessible online. The reaction and the support of the SharePoint community was marvelous and unparalleled! Mark Miller wrote a complete post about it, Mike Walsh showed great support to the idea through his blog and I received wonderful feedback even from non-Arabic speaking SharePoint folks congratulating me and urging me to record more sessions. The same happened once SharePoint4Arabs.com was officially launched. The number of retweets, announcements, and blog posts referring to it really surpassed my expectations.  

Before leaving you to benefit from the other great articles available at EndUserSharePoint, I would like to extend special thank-you’s  to some people that really supported and spread the word regarding SharePoint4Arabs.com, Egypt SharePoint User Group and my ARABIC session at SharePoint Saturday EMEA. The list includes but it is not limited to the following folks:

1. Mark Miller
2. Hammad Rajjoub and Ronald Widha (DotNetMEPodCast )
3. Joel Oleson
4. Hanan AbdelMeguid  ( LINKdotNET CEO )
5. Emad Alashi
6. Kailash Kalyani (MSFT)
7. Ruari Plint  (MSFT)
8. Saed Shela and Huthaifa Afanah (Palestine SharePoint User Group)

And of course, no tribute to the community is inclusive without my colleagues at SharePoint4Arabs.com, Marwan Tarek and Mohamed Yehia.

Guest Author: Ayman El-Hattab

Ayman El-Hattab is a SharePoint Developer & Speaker. He is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer as well as a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in SharePoint. Ayman writes articles about topics in relation to SharePoint and its related technologies for online magazines, publicly speaks for numerous user groups and offline communities, is the founder of SharePoint4Arabs.com, organizes events for EGYSUG and you will always find him active at MSDN and Technet forums.