Guest Author: Ayman El-Hattab

SharePoint Saturday Arabia was a live online, ten hour event on March 27th 2010. There were 15 Speakers, including 8 MVPs, and two simultaneous sessions running every hour. We had 750 registrants and around 150 attendees.

Initiation

Throughout my blog, twitter and Facebook, I’ve had wonderful opportunities to get connected with tons of nice folks in the Middle East and especially in Arabia. The one thing I have noticed they have in common is a thirst for SharePoint knowledge.

These people are truly in need for answers. They feel like they’re alone and don’t have enough conferences. Unlike Europe and America, they don’t have Visual How To’s in their native languages and just cheer up when they come across someone who knows their struggles.

The first step for bridging the gap and fulfilling the needs was creating a community channel and a place where Arab SharePoint professionals can share their expertise. Hence www.sharepoint4arabs.com was created.

Moreover, after the great success of SharePoint Saturday EMEA and the amazing feedback I received about my Arabic session there, I decided to follow Mark Miller’s footprints and to organize a similar event with more localized content for Arabs.

First step was contacting Marwan Tarek, my partner in most of my crimes, and asking him to help me in organize the event like managing speaker submissions, sponsor requests and making sure that speakers are having good and reliable internet connections. I also contacted Baransel Dogan and Ruari Plint (MEA MVP Leads) asking them to spread the word and ask more MVPs to participate.

I would like also to point out that Mark Miller has done a terrific job putting together the lessons learned from SharePoint Saturday EMEA in a brilliant article here. I would encourage anyone willing to run an online event to strictly follow the advice presented by Mark in this article. 　

The Event

We had Six MVPs plus two other people who were recognized as MVPs just 5 days after the event (I am happy to be one of those).

We also had other seven SharePoint experts in different countries and time zones. I would like to seize the opportunity and thank them all for their wonderful sessions and willingness to help and share. Special thanks go to Dux Raymond for staying up very late and keynoting the event. It was very nice having a SharePoint expert like Dux with us.

The event went very well; the speakers were punctual, interactive, and keen to share their expertise with the audience. We had one moderator per session. The moderator was responsible for keeping an eye on the chat room, managing the audience requests, passing the questions to the speakers, resolving any audio issues and recording the sessions. Egypt SharePoint User Group leaders and Ahmed Ramy from dotnetwork user group were responsible for moderating the sessions.　

Feedback

The best part of the event was the closure. We had an interesting talk with the audience about ways we can improve the event, whether they like this type of online event and how frequent they would like to see SharePoint Saturday Arabia.

The feedback was positive. I would like to refer to two blogs post that really made me happy and more determined to organize and sponsor more online events. I have even quoted some paragraphs here:

SPS Arabia event was truly amazing: http://techforceblog.com/2010/03/28/sps-arabia-event-was-truly-amazing.aspx

SharePoint Arabia (nontechnical view): http://baraahomari.blogspot.com/2010/03/sharepoint-saturday-nontechnical-view.html

"Yesterday, I’ve seen the success after months planning, I’ve seen achievements after team working, I feel so honored to join such a wonderful team. I almost felt like I’m one of them! The way they introduced each others was my favorite, they way they thank any speaker after his session was amazing, all speakers were proud to be a part of it. The online chat room was really active, the attendees were so friendly, I knew many SharePoint related new guys", By: Baraah Omari

“Each session lasted from 45 to 55 minutes followed by a Q & A session. All of the speakers were well versed in their topics and inspired a lot of questions from attendees. I was only able to attend 8 of the 16 sessions. The set up was really nicely done with two LiveMeeting Channels set up (one for the Arabic sessions and the other for the English sessions) this was used for the slide presentations and audio from the session speakers; along with an online chat room sponsored by endusersharepoint.com for questions from the attendee’s. The sessions started and ended pretty close to on time and everything was done really well.”, By : Johnathan

Here is more feedback I received from Razi Bin Rais, SharePoint MVP and one of the SharePoint Saturday Arabia speakers :

"Thanks for an amazing event, kudos to all the team members behind SharePoint Saturday Arabia. I been chatting about the event with couple of folks from Asia Pacific region and they are impressed by the quality and execution of the event. I am planning to do a detail blog post once the recording of the sessions are available."

Waiting for your blog post Razi and thanks for your e-mail :))

Another one is from Fabian Williams, one of the great experts who joined us in SharePoint Saturday Arabia :

"I have to echo the remarks and accolades for both the organizers and speakers in this event, spot on mates… I am looking forward for the next one. "

Thanks Fabian for your e-mail, I have received wonderful feedback about your session! I look forward to having you in our next event; Arabs love you man ;)

Recordings

 I have received lots and lots of e-mails, Twitter DMs and FaceBook messages from our attendees asking about the recordings and the slides. Sorry for being late, but the recordings needed some extra work and editing. I have just uploaded 15 hours of great SharePoint content to SkyDrive. Please let me know if you have any issues in downloading the recordings!

Session	Speaker
Keynote and Introduction to SPS Arabia	Dux Raymond, Ayman El-Hattab, and Marwan Tarek	Arabic / English	Download
Developing Sandbox Solutions	Mohamed Yehia	Arabic	Download
Troubleshooting SharePoint Solutions	Ayman El-Hattab, SharePoint MVP	Arabic	Download
Intelligent SharePoint Architecture and Storage Optimization Strategies	Dawid Kozlowski [AvePoint]	English	Download
Visual Studio tools for SharePoint	Marwan Tarek, SharePoint MVP	Arabic	Download
XSLT in SharePoint	Osama Mourad	Arabic	Download
SharePoint 2010 Architecture Fundamentals: Virtualization & Scalability	Michael Noel, Forefront MVP	English	Download
SharePoint 2010 Data Manipulation Techniques	Mostafa ElZoghbi, C# MVP	Arabic	Download
SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Document Management	Agnes Molnar, SharePoint MVP	English	Download
Unleash the Power of OBA with SharePoint 2010	Razi Bin Rais, SharePoint MVP	English	Download
Introducing ALM to SharePoint Development Implementations	Jeremy Thake	English	Download
SharePoint Identity Crisis	Michael Hinckley	English	Download
Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010	Jerry Yasir, SharePoint MVP	English	Download
SharePoint for Public Facing Web Sites	Jose Antonio Morales	English	Download
No Code Business Connectivity Services	Fabian Williams	English	Download
SharePoint 2010 Worldwide Deployment	Nicholas Georgeault, SharePoint MVP	English	Download

During the event, Jose Antonio Morales received lots of questions about Public Facing Sites with WSS 3.0 so he decided to create two more videos to answer the attendees’ questions. You can get Jose’s videos from the links below:

WSS 3.0 For Public Facing Sites – Part 1 

WSS 3.0 For Public Facing Sites – Part 2

Another question that we received more than once during the event was about installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7. My dear friend Mohamed Moses has done a great job summarizing the process in a short video. You can get Mohamed’s video from the link below.

Installing SharePoint 2010 Beta on Windows 7

Thanks again to all our attendees, speakers and everyone who helped me organize SharePoint Saturday Arabia. Stay tuned for more videos on SharePoint4Arabs.com !

Guest Author: Ayman El-Hattab

Ayman El-Hattab is a SharePoint MVP, developer, author and 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, offline communities and SharePoint Saturdays. Ayman is the founder of SharePoint4Arabs.com, organizes events for Egypt SharePoint User Group and you will always find him active at MSDN and Technet forums. Ayman has been recognized by Microsoft as SharePoint MVP in April 2010.