For the second annual SharePoint Saturday Pittsburgh, I got to speak again. Great venue at Carlow University, but I’ve not got the best AT&T coverage. I don’t know if it is the building or the location of the nearest tower. I stayed at the Hampton Inn in Irwin because it was very nice and less expensive than the Hampton Inn right next door. Plus, I didn’t want to worry about rush hour traffic leaving Pittsburgh when I was arriving on Friday night.
The schedule for this was great. I love that I know most of these speakers already. Some really great folks signed on for this. I decided to sit in on the following sessions:
John Ramminger’s Leveraging External Data in SharePoint Online and On Premises
Learned a lot here. Helping me to finally try to use Business Connectivity Services.
Tim Beamer’s Document Security in SharePoint, permissions aren’t enough
I think I can comfortably set up Data Loss Prevention in SharePoint for one of the guys I’m working for. I don’t know if I read about this or saw another session on it a year or more ago, but I could swear that I’d seen a lot of this content before.
My own session, SPS Analyst Series: The Build Process (I’ve given the same session over and over for a couple years now, but I do make tweaks.)
Wish I could have seen Joe McShea’s session, Spice Up Your forms and Views with Client Side Rendering (CSR), or Nikkia Carter’s session, BI: From the Basics. She is really good, but I see and talk to her often enough that I might be able to pick her brain another time.
Mohamed Derhalli’s Styling SharePoint Pages without Writing Code never happened.
He didn’t make it, so a bunch of us stayed in the room and just talked about crazy stuff we were running into. That is the best. A conversation is better than a lecture any day.
CA Callahan was the main reason I stuck around until the end of the day when I knew I’d have a five-hour drive going home. She had Now where did they put that? Overlooked web parts, features, and templates of SharePoint.
I always learn something new when I listen to her. The main thing this time was Word Automation Services. I had never even heard of that. One can create aspx files from Word documents with this. I really need to see it in action. To convert the content in a Word document from someone’s user guides or standard operating procedures, I had been publishing the Word document to a wiki then copying the html out of the body into the page where I wanted it. The best part of this was being able to have pictures come through properly formatted, and it is great for creating knowledge base articles. You can even make properly formatted Word templates for each kind of KB article you have so that the fonts, colors, and formats are all locked in place from a document library that has the template in its content type. This is definitely something I need to investigate further.
Sponsors of SPS Pittsburg included the following: