The first day of the NZ SharePoint Conference 2009 has come and gone. In two hours the second day starts. Here's my reflections on day one:
- For a community-driven event, it's fantastic. The three organizers -- Chan, Mark and Debbie -- volunteered to make it happen, and they have done a better job of organizing content, speakers and vendor booth area than many commercially organized events I've attended and spoken at in New Zealand. It's quite incredible.
- The fee for the two day event has stimulated attendance. It was only NZ$500 (about US$380) to attend for the full two days ... quite a difference from other commercially organized events that go for four times that much and then struggle to pull in 20 paying customers.
- Official figures on attendence have not been released, but as I said in my blog post yesterday, my count is about 300. The room for the keynote session with Joel was full ... and I did a rough count of people sitting and standing.
- There appears to be a good mix of people interested in the geek stuff of SharePoint and the business stuff of SharePoint.
- On the business side -- and there's a whole stream focused on this -- there is lots of attention being paid to user adoption strategies, business engagement, etc. Given my professional focus, I'm delighted to see this.
- I want two things to get better ... either today or next year: (1) availability of water to drink in the vendor booth area; and (2) better signs to indicate where to go for the sessions.
Looking forward to day 2 ... I'm on at 10am (in the business stream, talking about Seamless Teamwork).
