Last night was the very first presentation for the new Atlanta Microsoft Professionals User Group. This was also the first installment of the
SharePoint 1, 2, 3! training event. I think we were hugely successful, and I want to thank the people who worked the hardest to make this happen - Brendon Schwartz and Keith Rome. They put in twice the hours anyone else did. Thanks also go out to the event's sponsors - INETA, Intellinet and Microsoft. They provided everything except the actual content (actually, Intellinet reviewed our content for accuracy). We had over 50 people in attendance, which is a huge number of people considering this is a newly formed group. I'm happy to report that most if not all of the surveys were filled with glowing reviews.
Keith and I gave the actual presentation, which is now online and available for download at the
AtlantaMSPros.com website. This presentation was completely free of code, but it's target audience was actually the business users and administrators interested in SharePoint. We covered how to create a portal and a team site, how to add content such as announcements and contacts, how to manage documents with libraries and workspaces, and how to use some of the integration build into Office and SharePoint. There were fifty slides and six demos. We had so many questions about the capabilities of SharePoint, especially around the document libraries and the integration into Outlook and Word that we had to take some of the questions offline. We also had a ready-made job announcement aimed right at our target audience - the SharePoint business user and administrator. The size of the group and their interest in the topic proves to me that the demand in the industry for knowledgeable SharePoint techies is huge and growing.
Thanks again to Intellinet for stepping up to the plate with the financial and intellectual backing. We had four Intellinet team members on site to answer any questions and talk about custom solutions. Thanks again to INETA for their great advice and the fantastic boxes of goodies they provided for giveaways. Thanks go out to Microsoft and Doug Turnure for hosting the event. Finally, thanks again to Brendon and Keith for working tirelessly above and beyond the call of duty to ensure the success of this event. If the rest of the sessions go as smoothly as this one we'll have truely delivered some fantastic value to the community at a price that can't be beaten.
-- Matt Ranlett