Tuesday 14 April 2009

Slide deck from my deployment talk at Best Practices Conference

Had a great time presenting at the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference last week. I've been trying to put my finger on what made it such a good conference and I'm actually not sure, but I notice that other speakers and attendees have also been full of praise, so it's not just me. The event itself was extremely well-organized with excellent content, and Steve Smith and his team did a great job of looking after us speakers.

Highlights for me on the dev track were sessions from AC, Todd Bleeker, Eric (or "Uncle Eric" as I like to think of him, with his wise words on high-performance coding :-)) and Andrew Woody, but whenever I did stray from developer content I seemed to run into a great session like Mike Watson's on SQL Server in relation to SharePoint. Similarly I heard good things about speakers like Dan McPherson doing innovative sessions on the Information Worker track which I was disappointed to miss. [UPDATE: Here's a gratuitous shot of me in my session:]

COB_BestPracticesTalk_2

Another highlight was being on the two dev panel sessions we did, and having an interesting debate in one of them with Todd on approaches for provisioning - declarative (Features) vs. programmatic (code/PowerShell etc.). This was probably a good lead-in to my talk the next day, and some folks came up to say they really liked this conversation and that we covered it from angles they hadn't considered, which was good to hear. [UPDATE: Photo below of the second session, chaired by AC and with (from left to right) Todd Bleeker, Stacy Draper, Maurice Prather, Andrew Woodward, Ben Robb, Brett Lonsdale, me (with the mic) and Eric Shupps:]

DevPanel2

So all in all, a top conference, and fantastic to catch up with so many friends. Here's the link for my deck:

Slide deck - Approaches and best practices for deploying SharePoint sites through multiple environments (dev, QA, UAT, production)

SBP

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Chris,

Was great to catch-up and the conference, and really enjoyed your session. These conferences just dont come around often enough!

Daniel

Unknown said...

Hi Chris, I've just listened to your BPC talk (nice job) and am particularly interested in the deployment spreadsheet idea you mentioned. Is there any chance you could make one of these available for download. It would save me a bit of time from having to recreate it and I'm sure I wouldn't immediately think of all the fields of data that we should be capturing.

Thanks anyway,
James

Chris O'Brien said...

@James,

Absolutely - if you leave me another comment with your e-mail address, I *won't* publish that one but will then be able to send it you.

Sames goes for anyone else who wants it.

Cheers,

Chris.

Unknown said...

Hi Chris,

I ahve read many of your blogs and its the first time I am writing you.
I have recently pushed SHarepoint 2010 project in production. This has got a Site template, few workflow, event recivers, Infopath form, Data connection files and custom action. I am fairly ok with upgrading all the component in production except Site Templates.


In future this project many need new columns/updated columns in SP list. Can you guide me how should I approach this issue?

I have looked at the content deployment wizard on code project. When I exported a site and imported it on another web my Infopath form lost the data connections. May be I didnt used it properly.

But I need some gidance from you as in what is the best practice for incremental upgrade of site template in production.

I hope to hear from you.

Cheers,
Puja

Chris O'Brien said...

@Puja,

In SharePoint 2010, Feature upgrade is a good way to make most of the changes you describe. Check out my series on this topic - http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2010/06/feature-upgrade-part-1-fundamentals.html

Thanks,

Chris.