Speaking at the SharePoint Best Practices conference

By now you've probably seen a few posts on the Best Practices™ SharePoint Conferences which are coming up - I'll be speaking at the European 'edition' which is being held 6th - 8th April in London, UK. I submitted a couple of sessions, but here's the one which got confirmed:

Customizing SharePoint the supported way: from end-user to admin interfaces

One of the key concepts SharePoint developers must remember is that modifications to core shipped files are typically unsupported. This session looks at ways in which you can implement the kind of customizations your users may ask for without doing anything naughty. Aspects covered include custom site definitions, modifying the site administration/central administration areas, and changing the user controls SharePoint uses with the DelegateControl architecture. The session is packed with demos, and also contains tips on the best way to make other common customizations not shown in the detailed examples.

I'll probably be off his Christmas card list for saying this, but when Steve Smith (fellow UK MVP and conference organiser) mentioned a while back that he wanted to put something like this on and I should think of sessions, I kind of assumed he meant something with the usual UK suspects, a bit like a user group meeting on steroids. It was only when the site went up I saw how wrong I was! Many of the world's biggest SharePoint names are on the speaker list - the developer track has Andrew Connell, Todd Bleeker, Eric Shupps, Maurice Prather (ex SharePoint product group) and fellow UK SharePoint MVPs Andrew Woodward and Ben Robb. And that's not all - there are 4 tracks in total and I've already noticed some non-dev sessions I'd like to get to from experts such as Spence, Mike Watson, Ben Curry and others. The keynote speaker is Joel Oleson. Regardless of your level with SharePoint, for my money there is huge potential for pushing your SharePoint capability forward at this conference.

As an aside, the other session I submitted (which I really wanted to do!) was this:

Approaches and best practices for deploying SharePoint sites through multiple environments (dev, QA, UAT, production)

Solutions and Features, STSADM export, the Content Deployment API – all can be used to move SharePoint site artifacts from one environment to another, and all have different capabilities and limitations. Failing to plan your deployment processes properly can add significant risk to a SharePoint development project, and in some scenarios the problems may only become apparent when initial development is complete and updates need to be released. In this session we’ll explore the nuts and bolts of each development/deployment approach, and you’ll emerge on a firmer footing in this complex area of SharePoint. We’ll also touch on 3^rd-party tools which can help with the deployment puzzle, from Codeplex utilities such as the Content Deployment Wizard to emerging tools such as Kivati Studio.

If you're thinking of attending and would be interested in this topic, leave me a comment and if there's a good response I'll try and persuade the organisers to shoehorn me in somewhere (perhaps in one of the lunchtime sessions which haven't yet been announced).

European Best Practices™ SharePoint Conference

Look forward to seeing you there!