1,804 articles and 14,714 comments as of Saturday, March 19th, 2011

EndUserSharePoint has combined resources with NothingButSharePoint.com. You can now find End User (Mark Miller), Developer (Jeremy Thake) and IT Pro SharePoint (Joel Oleson) content all in one place!

This site is a historical archive and is no longer being updated. Please update your favorites, bookmarks and RSS feeds.

NothingButSharePoint.com
Thursday, August 12, 2010

The 1st SharePoint Saturday UK Event …..Ever!

Guest Author: Tony Pounder
Intelligent Decisioning

 

 

The 1st SharePoint Saturday UK Event….Ever!

  • 2nd October 2010
  • Birmingham Hilton Metropole
  • 300 Attendees
  • 15 speakers
  • 3 tracks

Hi, allow me to introduce myself – I’m Tony Pounder (@WorTony) and I’m a Senior SharePoint Consultant and Director of Intelligent Decisioning.  Along with Brett Lonsdale (@brettlonsdale) Lightning Tools of BDC Metaman fame and Mark Macrae (@m_macrae) Intelligent Decisioning, I am organising the 1st SharePoint Saturday event to be held in the UK.   

“The 1st SharePoint Saturday UK event ever?” I hear you ask – yep, that’s right, this will be the very first SharePoint Saturday event to be held in the UK….. EVER!

I’m sure readers of EndUserSharePoint are already aware of the success of SharePoint Saturday in the USA and Australia – recent attendance figures for the SharePoint Saturday DC event prove that without a shadow of a doubt.  Here in the UK we’d read about these events and heard from people who had attended a US event and it seemed that the UK was missing out by not having it’s own SharePoint Saturday event.

I think it’s worth pointing out at this point that in the UK we already have a booming, successful SharePoint User Group (SUGUK) which was setup and organised by Steve Smith (@SteveSmithCK) of Combined Knowledge and Nick Swan (@NickSwan) of Lightning Tools.  SUGUK has, for a long time held regular well attended, midweek evening meetings but there was nothing happening on the weekends and 5 SharePointing days a week didn’t seem enough some how

So what to do about this?  There seemed a number of options available:

  1. Those of us who wanted to attend a SharePoint Saturday could hop across the Atlantic and attend a US event.
  2. Not really an option for most due to costs, travel time and this actually goes against the SharePoint Saturday ethos of local SharePoint events for local SharePoint people.

  3. Hang around in the UK and wait ’til someone comes along and set up a SharePoint Saturday UK event.
  4. This could leave us hanging around waiting for an indeterminate length of time.

  5. Get together with some like minded people and organise the 1st SharePoint Saturday UK event EVER!.
  6. Great idea, why not get together with Brett and Mark.  I’d met Brett about 3 years before when he was running the SharePoint 2007 Developer Course for Combined Knowledge and I’ve known Mark since around 2000 when we worked together at a large international financial institution.  Brett, Mark and I would soon be able to organise a country wide event that was looking to attract 300 attendees and 15 speakers spread across 3 tracks wouldn’t we?  After all, how hard, time consuming could it be……. 

That was it then.  The 3 of us would plan and put together the 1st SharePoint Saturday UK event Ever.

Our 1st step was to contact Michael Lotter at the SharePoint Saturday organisation and register our intent to host this event.  Michael replied quickly and sent us a copy of the SP Saturday Planning Guide.  This guide is a 33 page document which leads the budding SharePoint Saturday organiser through the process of organising a SharePoint Saturday and it provides practical advice and guidance (built up through organising numerous SharePoint Saturday events) every step of the way.

The guide features the “rules” of SharePoint Saturday and also provides a week by week guide/checklist as to where you should be in the process and what you should be doing.  This document has proved to be invaluable in setting up our event and I’d like to say thanks again to the SharePoint Saturday Committee for being so prepared and assisting fledgling SharePoint Saturday organisers in numerous ways.

The 1st bit of advice from the guide is to get a venue and to announce nothing until that is “locked in”.  With our event targeting 300 attendees, 15 speakers and sponsors with sponsor booths, we had to find somewhere largeish that was easily accessible to all UK SharePoint people.  The obvious place (it seemed) was to look to the middle of the UK for the 1st event and so we went to look at Birmingham……..

We investigated a number of locations around the Birmingham area and we found what we wanted in the Birmingham Hilton Metropole.  The reasons we chose this location were it’s ability to handle (and feed) the number of attendees and sponsors as well as it being only a stones throw from Birmingham Airport, Railway Station and the UKs motorway network.  It’s location makes it easy to get to from anywhere in the UK and beyond.

After deciding on the location, we moved onto the session tracks and soon settled on Dev, Admin and IT Pro – something for everyone there!  We planned 5 sessions in each track, an hour for lunch and as much time as people wanted to allocate to the post show SharePint event

We then sent emails to potential speakers asking them if they would be interested in speaking at our event and if so to submit a session topic, bio and pic which we’d add to our web site.

We also sent emails to potential sponsors – in reality, a lot of these had already contacted us to say they would be interested in sponsoring the UK event – news travel fasts in the SharePoint world it seems and lots of SharePoint related companies want to be involved/associated with this event.  As we waited for replies to our emails, we began to build the events website – the skeleton of which is a SharePoint site provided by the SharePoint Saturday organisations to all event organisers.  Building the website made it feel as though we were making progress.

Speaker submissions have been coming in we are categorising them in to the 3 tracks to ensure an even balance to the sessions – we are looking to attract as wide a range of attendees to the event as possible.

We’ll be issuing a closing date for speakers very soon and working to finalise the Sessions plan so attendees can start to plan their day.  We’ll make an announcement on Twitter and the web site as soon as we’re done.  At the time of writing we have received a number of responses from speakers including :

I’ll take this opportunity to say a big thanks to all of the SharePoint Saturday UK speakers.  These guys give up their free time to help us put on a great event – Speakers!  We Thank You All.

We’re using EventBrite to handle the ticketing and we’ve found it to be simple and effective and can recommend it.  We’re making use of Facebook and Twitter (@spsuk) to publicise this event and so far the number of attendees rises every day and we’re looking good for achieving the 300 attendees we hoped for – the registration page is here if you’d like to signup. 

We are also exploring other ways of reaching out to the SharePoint community who are not using social networking.  We’re looking at providing partners of attendees and speakers alternatives to the event – such as a day hanging out in the Spa, Gym or similar – if you think that your non SharePointing partner will prevent you from attending then maybe see if there’s anything going on in the Birmingham area that they’d like to go do – there maybe other SharePoint widows/widowers looking to do the same   Here’s a few ideas from Tracey (@WorPet), my wife, who was hosting the “Not The SharePoint Conference” in Vegas back in October 2009

We have a number of sponsors in place but there’s room for more – If you want to get involved then details of the sponsorship packages available and how to submit your offer of help are here.  Details of our current sponsors can be seen here – we thank them all for their support of us and this event!

At the time of writing we are about 8 weeks away from the event and there’s still lots to do!  Organising this event is time consuming and hard work, especially when you have a day job – lots of it gets done in the wee, small hours after midnight but we’re all enjoying doing it and we are really looking forward to the event – it’s gonna be great!

Will we be organising another SharePoint Saturday UK?  Definitely!  Look out for the announcements on Twitter by following @spsuk for the latest news and info.

Final reminder, if you haven’t signed up already to the 1st SharePoint Saturday event in the UK then get your name down here for what will be a ground breaking SharePoint event.  Imagine saying to your your grandkids – “Did you just mention the 1st SharePoint Saturday event in the UK?  Well, I was there……..”

We look forward to welcoming you to the Birmingham Hilton Metropole.

Tony

@WorTony


More information/registration here

Guest Author: Tony Pounder
Intelligent Decisioning

Tony Pounder (@WorTony) is a Director of Intelligent Decisioning, a UK based Microsoft Gold Certified partner specialising in SharePoint, CRM and workflow.  He’s an active member of the SharePoint User Group community and a part of the team who are organising the 1st SharePoint Saturday UK event.

 

Please Join the Discussion

6 Responses to “The 1st SharePoint Saturday UK Event …..Ever!”
  1. Nick says:

    I’m supposed to be going home in September to see the folks As they live round the corner (literally) from the Metropole, I might have to reschedule a bit and come to this!

  2. Tony Pounder says:

    Hey Nick,
    sure spend time with your folks – but only after you’ve been to the 1st SharePoint Saturday UK event Ever! :-) Why not stay for the SharePint scheduled right after?

    Go grab yourself a FREE ticket to SharePoint Saturday UK and I look forward to meeting up with you on the 2nd October.

    @WorTony

  3. Sam Dolan says:

    Great blog post, I think this first UK event has the potentially to be as successful as the US ones that are held – I can’t wait!

  4. Derrick Jones says:

    I’m really looking forward to this – been ‘tinkering’ with Sharepoint for about a year now, and
    would love some direction… Just need to find a decent real ale pub nearby and I’m sorted… ;o)

    • Tony Pounder says:

      Hey Derrick,
      come along and you’ll get all the direction/assistance you could want.

      Don’t think there’s a real ale pub around though….

      Grab yourself a ticket – they’re going quick and say hello.

      Cheers

      Tony
      @WorTony

  5. Submitted outline for abstracts, and hoping to see everyone there. I LOVE being at a “first” event. — Mark


Notify me of comments to this article:


Speak and you will be heard.

We check comments hourly.
If you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!