The SUGDC Regional SharePoint Conference was this weekend (Friday and Saturday) and to my understanding from talking to people that attended both days it was a great SharePoint conference.  I didn’t get to attend both days but just Saturday when I was speaking but I had a great time on Saturday hanging out with Paul Galvin, Becky Isserman and Bob Fox during the afternoon.  This conference was a little different for me because it was the first event I ever spoke at that people actually paid money to attend.  I’m really curious what people thought and I’m hoping that I’ll get some evaluations from the people that attended my session.  I really want feedback from people good or bad so I can approve on things.  When attending some of the sessions with Paul and Becky one thing that I noticed was that I really need to spend a lot more time on getting my slides to look a lot nicer and probably slow down a little when I speaking.  One of the things that I keep catching myself doing is speeding through my sessions trying to get as much content in a session as possible instead of maybe spending little extra explaining things.  One of the things that I really enjoyed besides speaking on InfoPath was having the extra time talking with Paul and Becky and a few other people at the conference.  It is really nice to sit down and speak with people that do the same thing you do and listen to what they are saying and pickup new ideals and making new contacts.  It's too bad that I didn't have the chance to come on Friday so I could see Paul's session because I really think he has done a lot of cool things and I think it would have been a great session.

When preparing my presentation I did a lot of research qualifying everything I would be presenting and I was really impressed with all the detail information on the MSDN site.  I found so much information in the MOSS and WSS SDKs that I was really impressed.  I remember doing SharePoint 2003 it took forever for any good stuff to appear but that’s not the case for MOSS and WSS v3.  Anybody trying to learn SharePoint shouldn’t have any problem doing so anymore.

During the Roundtable session that Becky and I were doing on Ajax and InfoPath Paul asked some really good questions and I will be blogging about them over the coming days because I've had a little time to think about them and do some research.  I truly still can't believe how big InfoPath 2007 and InfoPath Form Services really is.

The conference was a blast and I would like to thank Bob Fox, Gary Blatt and Gary Vaughn for giving me a chance to talk at the conference and I hope they let me come back in the fall.

Cheers,
Michael