SPSEMEA was fantastic event. No, it was phenomenal. No, it was perfect. I could not imagined it better.
Everything was considered, starting from the chat rooms, the different channels, the log in info, the support of the moderators, the schedule, the diversity of the topics and speakers, it was global.
The day was exciting from the beginning. Starting off with the Keynote speech, where Joel was conferenced via a black berry attached to a microphone. He could not log in because of a firewall issue in MS. Everybody was moving in and out of the channels, logging in to different chat rooms. Ayman and I had two computers running two different channels watching them as the same time!!. Our Hyper-V server restarted twice for 10 mins before each of our sessions. We had to move quickly and we found a blank spot we were rescheduled Ayman's session. I was going live without the demos but that was saved as the server went live again
The feedback and buzz around the vent in the SharePoint community is amazing. I am not sure Microsoft would have done it better. This is definitely a job made well.
I had to think and stop for a while, what does this really mean? I had a big smile on my face to not only because I attended the event but also to participate in it. It made me proud. It makes stop and think of the power and momentum of the community. What the community can really do? What is it capable of? The SharePoint community is not only getting bigger but also more mature, responsive and agile. Everybody is communicating together. Everybody is sharing there knowledge. This definitely raises the bar for the rest of SharePoint event, online or offline. I think this event should recurrent, for example every quarter. I will definitely attend.
I just wonder, what's after SPSEMEA? How will the rest of the events be? How will the community react?
Special thanks goes to Mark Miller, the moderators, the rest of the SharePoint Saturday team and the sponsors for settings up such an event.
BR,
Mohamed Yehia