The second day at the SharePoint Conference in Dubai turned out to be a success too. There we some great sessions going on. The first session i attend was about Microsoft Dynamics and Integration with SharePoint given by Karim Talhouk. The session contained a lot of information around Dynamics and how it was integrated and using SharePoint as a presentation layer.
The next session i attend was Administering Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies 2007 using STSADM.EXE given by Todd Klindt. It was an one hour session only about one command line tool. Not many people know that you can do a lot with it. Its even possible to create a script which builds up a complete farm. Check out the blog of Todd for more information and references for some cool scripts with STSADM.EXE.
After the lunch we started with the session SharePoint 2007 Advanced Administration given by Joel Oleson and Todd Klindt together. This was a great session about some very usefull information around Administering of SharePoint. As i said to Joel, there were some really cool things i had to write down. Check out his slides of the presentation on the blog of Joel Oleson.
Some usefull information is:
1) When using a farm give the index server also the role for being a web server. Keep it out of the load-balancing of the WFE servers. This will let the index server use itself for creating the indexing and will not hit the same WFE servers used by your visitors.
2) Make use of WAN Accelerators when within the company a need is for worldwide connectivity and the connectivity is not that quick.
3) Check out SharePoint Governance and Manageability for some great tools like for example undeleting webs and sites.
Then it was up to Jerome Thiebaud to give a very difficult presentation about SharePoint as a BI Platform. Its a very difficult subject and as I know for myself, running it as a demo in a virtual pc can give you a lot of pain. He did an overwhelming session with some great out-of-the-box stuff using BI in SharePoint. Some of his demos gave him a hard time, but he managed well. Great job!!
The last presentation of the day was about Enabling Social Computing in the Enterprise and Communities with SharePoint Products given by Patrick Beeharry. Its a difficult subject which not everybody understands well. But he gave a good presentation around Social Computing. As i said in an earlier post, a lot of people don't see the importance of Social Computing in companies. It can deliver a great solution for sharing information around the company about subjects, projects, skills and people by connecting them all together.
Finally the last part of day 2 was the closing keynote. All the speakers of this conference were put on to the stage to give people the oppertunity to ask questions. Joel got a lot of questions. Yeah he is a real expert around SharePoint. By filling in the reviews we could win some prices, but i didn't.
For Muhanad it was also a great day. He became not very well the evening before and could not attend the co-presenting session with Joel, but he got some cool signatures from the speakers.
After that i went with Muhanad and Mohammed to Coco's for a bite. They had great burgers and it was in the middle of the main street with incredible high buildings.
We went back to the hotel waiting for Joel and Todd to get back. They were out with the Microsoft Gulf group.
We got a call from Atif Rawn (AvePoint) and Tianyi Jiang (Chief Operating Officer of AvePoint) to go to the Carnaval Mall. Both great guys working for AvePoint. The mall was incredible big and it had even a river inside it where you could take a boat ride. We met with Adnan Rafik (Principal Consultant from IT SELEKT) who also attended the conference. Dubai is a real cool and social city :)
To give an example how Dubai people (not all of them) go shopping at the mall. Do i need to say more?
Finally we went back to the hotel to meet Joel and Todd. We had some great talks all together about things like changing pictures with sleepy guys and .... (just ask Todd), and talked about different cultures all over the world. Around 2:30 in the morning we all went to bed.
Joel, Todd, Muhanad, Mohammed, Adnan, Tianji and Atif, thanks for the great time in Dubai. I'm really impressed by everything i heard, spoke about and the way how people in Dubai are passionate about SharePoint and other things.
Thanks!!! :)