The first ever MOSSCamp was held this past Friday
(November 9th, 2007) in Chicago,
IL. This was a devcamp style event that was focused around Windows SharePoint
Services and SharePoint 2007.
Standing Room Only
One of the highlights of MOSSCamp was the number of people that showed up to the event,
as near as we can figure we had about 110 people at one point or another during the
day. Closely related to this highlight (actually directly proportional to it)
was the lowlight that we pushed the facilities to the edge. It was standing
room only for the first couple hours of the event (as you can see by the photo, campers
were literally spilling out into the halls). I appreciated the patience that
everyone showed with tight quarters. We capped the registration at 130 campers
and wait listed 10 more folks (many more people wanted to come to the camp, but we
had to turn them away). To answer a question that many people might be asking,
we did not plan for 110 people. We actually thought we would get between 80-90
(we based the estimate on historical drop off figures from past events, which are
typically 25-40%). Clearly we underestimated the interest that people had in
MOSSCamp and when we have a MOSSCamp 2008 (and there is a good chance that we will),
we will adjust the registration numbers and / or get a bigger room.
The camp organizers did all that we could to ease the congestion. I for one
gave up my seat at the event, and even exited the main room (I hung out in the kitchen
area and talked with campers). Many of the camp organizers also skipped lunch
so that we could make sure everyone got a shot at the pizza (thankfully everyone did
get at least one plate of pizza). The office manager at Clarity ordered up dozens
of cookies for an afternoon snack (the pizza went so fast that nobody was able to
get seconds). The guys at K2 stepped up big
for us by having an unplanned breakout session during lunch so that we could relieve
some of the congestion in the main room and even ran that session twice (thanks guys).
My Favorite Parts of the Camp
I have to say that the SharePoint airing of grievances was one of the best
parts of the camp. We gave the campers about 15 minutes to stand up and say
things they don’t like about SharePoint or to raise issues that they
have had when using the platform. It was meant to be a fun activity, but was
also an opportunity for people to connect. We had several people bring up issues
that other people in the camp had either solved or had some expertise around the problem
so that they were able to help each other. Here was the grievances that were
aired during the session:
| Timeout on Large Infopath files | HTML Editor is weak |
| Column level security on lists | XHTML Compliance (Poor HTML, Table Driven, Styling Webparts) |
| Filtering Views is not clear | WYSYWIG on Web Parts |
| Impersonation Testing | 13 connection limit on connected web parts |
| Having all fields available on contacts | Lotus Notes Integration |
| Service Unavailable Message | Relative links are broke |
The other thing that I enjoyed was talking to the campers on how they were using SharePoint.
I met a gentleman from a large company that was telling me about their SharePoint
implementation and he mentioned that they had “200,000 users on their implementation”.
I said “Oh, you have an Internet facing implementation”. He said “No, we have
that many employees and they are all on SharePoint”, he then showed me some very impressive
architectural diagrams on the implementation (jaw dropping). I also met a guy
who told me that he is “an open source guy”, but SharePoint is compelling enough that
his consulting company is starting to focus on it.
Don’t call it a barcamp
MOSSCamp was structured as an unconference,
but the organizers made it clear that that we should not draw any parallels to barcamp.
Barcamps are user generated conferences that cover a broad variety of topics (I was
in a gene splicing conversation at a barcamp), but in general the barcamps are focused
on Open Source technologies. Because SharePoint is a commercial product we wanted
to make sure that we did not say “it is like a barcamp”. We also made sure that
the camp Wiki was not hosted on http://barcamp.org.
This was also a good chance to show how you can host a wiki on WSS.
There was some trepidation at first with the unconference style of the event.
It took a few minutes for the campers to get into the groove of participating in the
event. By the end of the day, people were just hanging out in various parts
of the Clarity office learning and sharing with each other.
Technorati
Tags: mosscamp , SharePoint , WSS , devcamp
