I just got back from the MVP summit 2007 and as with all conferences I tried to meet as many folks as I could.  I met Sean O’Driscoll who, as it turns out, is the person ultimately responsible for the MVP award program.  I must say Sean has a great sense of humor.  Met Jason Medero for the first time, we are working on the same Wrox book.  We discussed everything from balance of life issues to crazy clients.  Because of our conversation I’m getting a kayak, canoe or something and paddle up and down the intracoastal in the morning and making some time for me. 

When it comes to balance of life we all decided to take Monday off and shoot each other with paintballs.   Besides doing the Macarena, I think paintball is the most fun I’ve ever had.  Dan Larson has some video of paintball, but I think Conelius van Dyk’s blog post was first.  Andrew Connell shared his thoughts on the day as well. 

I’d like to thank Robert Bougue for carting our butts around and now, officially and publicly, apologize to him for shooting him when I was out of bounds. . . . I didn’t know.  Honest. 

Paintball was a ton of fun, 23 of us shot off 24,000 rounds.  Someone calculated that it was 67 paintballs in the air in any given minute, but you really have to think about that.  From the time we shot our first paintball to the last was 6 hours.  But we weren’t playing that entire time.  You have to consider we took a break to catch our breath, drink some water, get air and of course buy more paintballs.  So when there was a paintball in the air there were a lot of paint balls in the air.

It was my first time ever playing, one game was called attack defend.  The defenders have to keep a bell from getting run and the attackers have to ring a bell.  Brad Smith came up with an amazing strategy, “We’ll surround them and shoot everybody we see.”  So we did.  We met in the middle so quickly we started shooting at each other and the referees were laughing.  We all thought they were laughing because we were such aggressive bad asses, as it turns out they’ve never seen a team so aggressively cannibalize itself.  I was shooting at Brad from what I thought was the safest place in the world.  I was sheltered, uphill, with only a 10 inch opening.  He actually shot me right in the eye.  Good shootin’ Brad, even if we are on the same team, I’m still really very impressed.  I’m sure there is a lesson in here somewhere about communication. 

In another game I ran out of air in my gun, so I resorted to throwing paintballs by hand.  Loke Kit Kai shot me.  He said he felt bad because I was so close.  I had to be close because I throw like I use a mouse for a living.  His wife though, Stephanie, she's quite the stealthy one and I, like many of my teammates, was so glad she was on my team. 

Lawrence  really showed us a great time.  He took us to a couple of dinners one at Elliott’s Oyster House where I had a spearfish, it was yummy.  What a great team building day!  Thanks for everything LL, you’re the best!

Of course we all talked a lot of technology the other days, but that’s all under NDA.  The MVP Summit was basically Microsoft employees who were in charge of various products telling us what they had in mind and we told them what we thought and what we thought they should have in mind.  I learned that Shane Young has a long career ahead of him with his upgrade training, because there’s not a lot of automation in that space beyond what the SharePoint team blog's post on the upgrade toolkit points out. 

Adam Buenz, as I found out, is a good guy to have your side of an argument.  He spontaneously created a list of gripes and everyone was impressed with the roll he was on.  He became somewhat of an ambassador for the rest of us.  You could hear other people in the background whispering through him Adam would effectively communicate it to the folks at the podium as if he were some walking talking megaphone.

Who knows what they do with the information but they did seem to cherish it, which made me feel special.  They probably take that information and compare it with their other channels of information.   Somehow digest it all and figure out what the next versions of the products are going to be.  All I can say is that I’m totally impressed with the new stuff they are thinking about while still being enamored with the current stuff.

As with most conferences networking is golden.  I got to see many folks that I met in Berlin like Michael Gerth, Daniel Wessels, and Renaud Comte who represented France and Americans like Woody, Michael Noel, Mike Ammerlan, Fitz, and John Paul.  Michael Noel is always interesting to talk to, because we came into SharePoint from exactly opposite directions.  He entered from administration and I from development and we both know the product really well and overlap in skills so much it’s somewhat amazing to realize that we have such different backgrounds.  He’s obviously progressed a lot further in his career than I have, but I think it’s only because he’s smarter.  It’s always a pleasure to talk to him about anything.   Never forgetting the fellas from the UK who are turning out to be great pals of mine Spencer Harbar, Steve Smith, Nick Swan and Stephen Cummins (in no particular order of course J ).

Stephen brought his wife but I didn’t get a chance to meet her.  Todd Klindt did get to meet his wife and daughter on the plane and he shared with us that their daughter is just the cutest little thing. 

I’m excited for Nick Swan and Todd Baginski.  They are selling a tool called the BDC  meta man if you haven’t heard of it and you have to do anything with BDC you should go look at their product.  Compared to the number of sales they had when I was in Berlin to the number of sale they had when I was in Seattle they had a 50% growth in sales.  That was just 2 weeks apart.  Amazing growth you guys, keep up the good work! 

Of course Florida was well represented!  Andrew Connell, John Holliday who are both going to the code camp next week, March 24 and I’m defiantly going to try to make it.

I really want to make it to an Australian conference some time.  I had the privilege of meeting Ivan Wilson and Gayan Peiris a couple of really cool and smart guys.  Maybe some day I can go, I’m just spread so thin trying to get my arms around Europe.  I did get a chance to practice my Spanish with Carlos Segura Sanz, as it turned out he’s from Pamplona, where they have the running of the bulls.  I’ve always wanted to go there.  As most people know, my wife Macarena is from Spain, so I’m always trying to figure out how to learn the culture well enough to work there. 

Dustin Miller had to have come up with one of the best lines that I heard on the trip.  Dan Larson kept hanging up on Brad Smith because Brad was trying talk Dan out of going for sushi or at least waiting until we got there so we could all go.  Apparently there’s no getting between Dan and his sushi.  I can hardly blame Dan, I’ve eaten there before (with him as a matter of fact) and it was great.  At one point a frustrated Brad bulldogged up and stammered out, “Stop hanging up on me . . . or I’m going to . . . rip out your throat . . . and choke you with it!”  Immediately after saying so you can see the frustration in Brad’s face as he lets out a deep sigh, tilts his head down, hangs up the phone and Bob Fox asked, “Did he hang up on you again?”  Dustin looks up at Bob asking, “10 thousand sperm and you were the fastest, huh?” In the end Adam, Eli, Brad and I had a great time shooting pool at belltown billiards. 

Mathew McDermott caught me having breakfast one morning, what an interesting guy who really knows his stuff.  One day while taking a bus we talked about some nice additions to SharePoint along the lines of user management and I think I’m going to try to build some of them.  I ran some ideas past Mike Ammerlan and he gave me a much better approach than what I had in mind so I really can’t wait to try it out.

Cornelius Van Dyk and I had the same flight back to Chicago.  We talked about our individual community projects we have our sights set on and are going to try to help each other out.  He got me all excited about a SharePoint wiki idea I had a while back.  I brought it up to Lawrence back in October but I set it aside because Dustin was doing something similar really soon.  I need to follow up and see what’s going on there.  Corne created some blogs as he went.  It’s amazing that Bill Gates even let’s people ask questions as this one about lotus notes was a classic, and I thought this one on world hunger was great response as well.  Corne also got some nice photo’s from the key note as well. 

I think it’s a real privilege to hear Bill Gates speak.  I’ve heard he’s so rich that if he were to throw 10 grand out the window while driving down the road at 60 miles an hour would cost him more to turn around and pick it up.  There was a huge line forming before breakfast.  I thought people were going to throw their wives panties on the stage!  It turns out that the forum was nicely sized, I still got breakfast and was only 3 rows back and one group of seats off center.

Bob Mixon has a nice assortment of photos too. 

By the way I purposefully left Gary Bushey out, just kidding Gary.   Dan has another great video of Kells from Thursday night.  This was a really great trip and that’s all I can say without damaging careers (namely my own). 

I’ve been at this blog post for nearly 5 hours and seem to have run out of transitional sentences.  Believe it or not it’s a lot of work to name drop, never mind all the links!  Suffice it to say I met a lot of interesting people from all parts of the world some are new friends while some are old friends and I feel privileged for it all.  Now it's time to firm up those connections and chase down those ambitious dreams!

UPDATED: March 20, 2007

Ivan Wilson just posted his photos

 

UPDATED: March 23, 2007

Renaud Comte just posted his photos

I’ve been to the Microsoft campus a few times.  I’ve gone for an authors and publishers briefing, MMIT training (during the week of 9/11 and decided to drive back home) and I was there earlier this year for a SharePoint conference, but this was the first time that I’ve ever been paid by Microosft.  I’d have to say that it was an outstanding experience!

 

I met Todd Baginski for the first time and as it turns out I had a lot of explaining to do.  Todd asked me why I thought he’s full of crap.  I was dumbfounded.  I had no idea what he was talking about.  He jogged my memory by referring to a blog post I made last month.  Back peddeling as deftly as I could I explained I felt the first post I read was aggressive and via my blog I was trying to communicate that he really pulled through by meeting his publicly stated goals.  He bought that and instead of grabbing me by the face and dragging me around the campus, ultimatly we became pretty good friends.  Really though, Todd is just a fun loving guy who doesn't take himself to seriously, even though he probably could given all the cool stuff he's done. 

 

I also met Eli Robillard, who I’ve worked with in the past.  He was a technical reviewer providing, Jason and I, feedback on our work.  Everything was always via email, never even once speaking by phone, so it was fulfilling to meet the person behind the feedback. Eli is one of these easy going agreeable people who asserts him self in a positive way.  He’s a very “Yes, and . . “ kind person rather than a “No, but . . .” person.  I admire his blog quite a bit  blog was a major influence for me doing mine.  He co-ordinates a SharePoint user group.  I gave this some thought in the past but I immediately discredited it because I thought it was too niche.  But seeing the success in his makes me want to help put one together in my area. Maybe in the new year?

 

There were other people I worked with last week who are equally impressive as Eli and Todd, the whole experience was just outstanding and I really hope to do something like it again in the future. 

I had a blast at the code camp, even though I burned through $1,100.  Well I brought my family too, so I wasn’t exactly the role model of an economy traveler, more like a mini vacation.   

Joe Healy asked me why I wanted to go all the way to Tallahassee.  Being all about telling the truth in an attractive manner I responded with, “So I can learn to be a better speaker.”  The fact of the matter is I just don’t want to do a bad presentation where people know me. But the audiences seemed to like it.  I had a couple of people ask me if I was available for work.  I had to ask myself, “They just saw the presentation and still want to work with me?”  So, I’m looking forward to giving these presentations locally.  Presenting locally could still be a problem though.

David McNamee, who somewhat represents Microsoft, covered his face and shook his head 7 times.  On the upside, 2 of those times he  used only one hand.  I took the session hostage, by explaining to Dave that I would kick and scream like a spoiled little girl if he tired to carry me out.  During the previous week I had nightmares of someone banging a great big gong and pulling me off with a hook.

I’ve been working with the Beta 2 for this presentation and I thought I had a really nice presentation all laid out.  I have a dual processor on my workstation and the VMWare can only use one processor.  The processors between my laptop and my workstation are a little over 1ghz apart and the drives are a bit different quality as well. That withstanding, I can normally prepare images on my workstation and they run just a bit slower on my laptop.  I was experiencing a timeout problem which wrecks havoc on state.  Not to mention that the expectation in quality of what you say is directly proportional to the long pause just before you say it.  It’s sometimes difficult to make, “ . . .  and we check the checkbox  ( when it finally appears ) and click “OK”. . . ” sound more profound than it really is.

In all I had three presentations the first was a cute little Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow kind of thing that I didn’t expect many people at, but there were quite a few. Something like 17% of the conference attendees.  Then I had the BDC walkthrough where I showed how to get data from the adventure works database and finally an adoption chalk talk.  I expected the most people at the chalk talk, ironically we got the fewest.  That to me seems to be the hardest thing to do.  Computers are easy - they do what you say, if you tell them correctly.  Working with people can be like herding cats.  Some folks have an agenda that conflicts with other folk’s agendas.  I actually have a couple of books on negotiation just for implementing SharePoint.   And that’s not fairly stated I just happen to implement SharePoint a lot more than any other enterprise application.  It’s any application that has such a broad reach across an enterprise that causes the people problems.

I think the chalk talk was the most profound, even though we had the fewest attendees.  Dave McNamee, John Holliday, and myself (in order by first name) were the speakers.  I thought we were going to fight about to use FrontPage or not to use FrontPage, but we covered a lot more ground than that.  We each shared what we thought caused a successful implementation and the audience members shared their various levels of successes.   Some common denominators were building applications that are useful and timely, training, buy in from the upper management as well as the folks who actually do the work.  We also talked about the roles that corporate culture has to play and how different techniques can be used in different situations.   And somehow got a very interesting tangent about the future and how adoption will be easier.  Technologies like workflow and what ISV’s are going to bring to the table, ect.  It was very interesting and engaging for us and for the audience members.

Dave had to run, literally, he’s participating in a marathon on Sunday.  I met John Holiday for the first time and drove him back to his hotel.  We shared our history with one another.  I love conference, user group meetings, and all these get togethers.  It’s great to meet other people and share experiences and see how differently people arrive to where they are today.  If you ever get a chance to meet John, be sure to ask him how he got into programming.  It’s one of the most interesting stories I’ve heard.

On to the party!

This party was outside on a partially covered patio and the weather was great.  There was a band playing some pretty cool music and lots of ladies dancing around.  Well, so I was told by some single guys, as I am married I do not notice that sort of thing on my own.

I like the parties after these events.  There you get to meet people in their most natural and crudest forms.  Well ok, maybe I’m the only naturally crude one.  But I learned a lot there as well.  I learned that I am not a code whore as I always previously thought.  I’m a Code Escort.  This was taught to me by Steve Lane who obviously has been a consultant for a while.  A ragged Tom Fuller was there, apparently he had just flown in from New York where he spent a week long of intense training.  Developmentor kicks ass.  I poured some beers down his throat, to help him feel better.  He was planning to catch a ride with someone going south as I’m writing this I’m wondering if he’s not still in Tallahassee?  I really hope he’s not holding up a sign that says will SOA for food! Raenell Garner is always a lot of fun at parties, makes me think of that song, “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend could code like Raenell?”  Joe Healy was making rounds while Keith Rowe was handing out OP shirts for those who were inappropriately dressed.  I met Jim Wooley and Noah Subrin for the first time a couple of really great guys and got a chance to rub elbows with other speakers as well, like J.T. Taylor, Vinay Ahuja, not to mention all the other speakers and attendees.  Oh and the bartenders name is Emily, she’s just earned her degree in Art History, moving to Atlanta in 6 weeks and doesn’t have a job yet.  I’m so frustrated seeing people go to school for four years and not being able to get work in what they have trained for.  Let’s do that networking thing.  If you or someone you know can help her let’s hook her up.

Lawrence Liu is The "Senior Technical Product Manager and Community Lead". I don't know what that is either.  I just know that one of the things he's interested in is developing SharePoint community. Well, me too!  I actually made a point to study the SharePoint Team Blog as part of my research before leaving for the conference.  I picked out some people that I already knew of like Mike Fitzmaurice and Ryan Rogers (I've spent a lot of time on the phone with that guy working through some problems) among others and some that I didn't know too well like Lawrence.  He also has a techNet blog.

Lawrence shot me an email and asked me out to lunch to talk about SharePoint from a developer perspective.  I felt pretty lucky, especially just after researching the guy.  He took me to a nice restaurant, the Seastar Restaurant & Raw Bar, where we had some of the best seafood ever.  Just saying that he had the Salmon and I had the tilapia isn't going to cut it.  He gave me a wedge of his Salmon and it was absolutely the best Salmon I've ever had.  I'm not a big salmon fan, simply because of the oils, the taste and the smell.  Other than that I think it's pretty O.K.  This wasn't just your ordinary salmon.  This was Copper River King Salmon.  Apparently only the best of the best survive the harsh Copper River.  In short the Copper River Salmon has evolved into a better tasting Salmon.  Apparently these salmon are available everywhere.  I like trying seafood in different parts of the world (that have neighboring oceans of course). It gives you a real taste of life.  The tilapia was outstanding!  I was leaning toward the trout.  Very common on the west coast and they sometimes have it on the east coast, but it's just not the same.  I saw the tilapia on the menu and just had to go for it.  I hadn't had it in so long I had forgotten about it.  I put my first bite in my mouth and had to stop and think about it, "Man this is good!"  The food was so good it was distracting for a moment and then I had to piece together what Lawrence was saying.

During the course of our conversation a couple of interesting topics came up CodePlex and technorati.  CodePlex is like a sourceforge or a gotdotnet kind of thing.  I've only participated in two projects on gotdonet and they quickly died.  But the projects are still there and that's where the problem comes in.  There's a lot of projects that are very personal and as a result are not usually useful and the others are just clutter.  Like the two that I belong too.  CodePlex has had a silent launch, just a few memebers.  Nobody has done any marketing on it at all.  I heard about it for the rest of this week at the SharePoint Conference 2006.  I'm convinced nothing spreads faster than word of mouth.  I have an idea for a project but it's not nearly as cool as some of the other stuff that's up there.

The other piece of information that I picked up was technorati.  I asked how he found me, it didn't jump out at him right away.  As it turns out he uses technoroti to find blogs that matches what he's interested in looking for.  He didn't actually find me through technorti he found me through Duray's blog.  I'm starting to get why they call it the WEB (sarcasim).

Lawrence is a really great guy and I hope we can become better fiends over time.  Besides he gave me a really useful gift.  A laser pen that is integrated with PowerPoint.  So now I can get up an walk around while I give SharePoint presentations.

I went to be at almost 2 am and woke up at 6:30 am.  What a drag.   I couldn't sleep anymore because my eyeballs wouldn't stay shut!  It did give me a chance to catch up on some email and and IM with a friend of mine who is preparing for a presentation.  Yesterday when I got back to my hotel I went through all my notes and blogged about what I had seen and could remember for the day.  There was a lot of stuff, I learned in one day.  Most of this stuff is 100 level type stuff for now but that's fine,  I've never seen some of these features before.  This morning I'm still enamored with wiki's blogs and rss.  I'm all inspired to put up a SharePoint community site mostly a wiki and maybe a blog.  There's already a site dedicated to SharePoint blogs they seem to do a good job there.

Last night my editor from Addison Wesley took me out to a seafood restaurant.  We had a pretty cool waitress, who advised us on what to eat.  She did a really good job, I asked for a desert and she could tell by looking at me I didn't need it.  So she didn't bring it.   For appetizers Joan had the coconut shrimp and I had "tater tots".  They were shaped like the barrel tator tot that you got in your school lunch,  but they had fish inside.  Kind of like a croquetta.  Yumm!  Then for dinner we each had the Halibut.  It was awesome and very hard to describe.  If I told you that it had Bar B Que sauce on it you'd cringe.  But it was delicious!  I'm an eater not a critiquer!   Joan is exceptionally cool, she's done a lot of thing with her life so far, very well traveled. 

As it turns out she has an affection for Spain and so do I.  Well I must, since I married a Spaniard.  We compared notes on our experiences and it was refreshing to see someone who had spent some quality time there and have the similar experiences that I had.  She's one of those kind of people that are just really easy to talk to.  Very inquisitive in a non-invasive, non-threatening sort of way and then really listens to your responses.  Simply a warm and inviting person.  I didn't know how to act.  I'm sure her listening skills is one of the things that makes her a great editor.  Like I've indicated before she's had a really very interesting life.  I hope to learn more about her next time we meet.

That reminds me, everyone that I've worked with at Addison Wesley is really cool.  Every communication that I have is a very positive one.  They are an easy group of people to work with.  So far very honest, matter-of-fact and down to earth.  I like 'em all!  Elizabeth, the editor of the last book, is leaving soon for maternity leave.  She's all set up to have twins.  It's one of those things where you're happy for her but sad for yourself.  I didn't want a different editor, I like Elizabeth already.  Leave us alone!  But Joan has turned out to be wonderful too.

If you ever have some great content that you want to produce I'd suggest contacting Addison Wesley.  They have a lot of people on the marketing side that are really great too.  I just don't want this to turn into a long mushy blog.

Well it's time to go to the conference and maybe squeeze out a lab.  I'm interested in Content Types this morning.