This post is part of a series of posts about the SP24 Virtual SharePoint Conference.

Wow! What an experience – SP24 and SP24 Rewound are now over, and on reflection, it’s certainly been one of the most challenging projects I have ever undertaken. What started out as a very cool, simple idea in May 2013, ended up as a gargantuan project which consumed my life right up to the launch date of 10pm GMT April 16^th2014. The Conference was organized and developed by 8 Volunteers and this post will hopefully share a little bit about my “SP24 journey”. I know the rest of the SP24 team have their own experiences and reflections, but I will let them share theirs in their own way.

The crazy idea!

I had co-founded SharePoint-Community.Net (SPCOM) some months before (which is another story), and as part of the effort to bring great SharePoint content to the site, I grew to love List.ly, which is a simple way to curate, share, embed and vote on lists – and there are plenty of examples on SPCOM. When I first started using List.ly, it was still a developing service, so I spent time sending feedback back to Nick Kellet (list.ly CEO) offering suggestions on how things could be improved and through this interaction, we became on-line friends. One day, Nick sent me “THE” email with the subject: “You should run a 24 hour Virtual Conference like these guys”. As it transpired, there was another conference called TFT which lasted for 24 hours, set-up and run by Chris Dancy. Nick rightfully thought that it would be a great thing to do for the members at SharePoint Community. I always get way too excited by fresh ideas, so from the moment I received the email, I was sold – and my life was about to change for the next 12 months…

How hard could it be?

TFT used Google Hangouts to deliver their conference, and they sensibly scheduled 1 session every hour for the 24 hours. They used a YouTube channel to show the live content, and had Anchors covering 6 hours at a time which helped provide some continuation. If we copied this format, it was a proven recipe for success, and any sane person would have gone down this path. However, what happens when you get a few insane technicians on a Skype call intent on planning a virtual conference? Scope creep – that’s what happens! The ideas started to flow like lava from a volcano – they were unstoppable and had soon snowballed into a conference of epic proportions! Our confidence was high and besides, how hard could it be?

A Team from the SharePoint Community

The team was made up mainly from guys I had met on-line in SharePoint-Community.net. After a few meetings and questions about the sanity of what we were about to do, we were all ready to go! Whilst we said hello and goodbye to a few down the line, in essence, the team ended up being a mixture of SharePoint developers, administrators and a Project Manager.

Youtube channel, vs WordPress vs SHAREPOINT!

To follow the TFT conference we would have chosen pure Youtube / Hangouts with a few promotional pages to front it. However, one question was bugging me from day 1! How could we possibly run a SharePoint Conference NOT on SharePoint? We had raised a few eye-brows when we went for Ning.com for SharePoint-Community.net, so I wanted to really go for it this time and attempt to get it running as a public-facing SharePoint site. This naturally led to a flurry of questions amongst the team such as “Which version?”, “How much will it cost?”, “Who is going to develop it?”, “How much will it cost?”, “Who is going to host it?”, “How much will it cost?”, etc. As you can see these are all questions that organisations wanting to move to and / or develop on SharePoint ask themselves every day. In fact, these very same questions, got asked on SPCOM and resulted in answers meaning we had to go for Ning purely based on cost and development time. Putting the development effort aside for a minute, one of the greatest costs that we had to cater for was hosting it. To run the Conference we had no budget, so no way to pay for hosting! What else was I to do? I went on the hunt…

Our Knights in shining armour (Fpweb.net) …

I had already had discussions with Jesse from Fpweb.net for a previous requirement, so popped him an e-mail which went something like “Can you host this crazy idea for us – we want to you run an on-line conference capable of hosting 10,000, but with no real idea of how many will actually attend and we would like you to do this for free?” Before I received the reply I was already thinking about alternatives; after all, whywould they do this, as we were effectively asking them to take a huge leap of faith with us? But leap they did!! I can’t stress this enough, Fpweb.net believed in the idea when it was barely an idea and set about building us a platform to work our magic on. For that I can’t thank them enough, and can honestly say that without their help the idea of pulling a virtual SharePoint conference on top of SharePoint would have probably died a very quick death. One other very impressive quality that shone through from Fpweb.net was that they treated us just like they would a paying customer, right from the word go. They supported our numerous requests and were always incredibly helpful.

The post An SP24 Adventure – The idea appeared first on Collaboris.

This post is part of a series of posts about the SP24 Virtual SharePoint Conference

There are so many people that made SP24 possible, probably way too many to mention here, but I would like to highlight a few heroes!  These are by no means in any particular order.

THE SPEAKERS AND ANCHORS

We ended up having an incredible 98 Sessions hosted by an equally incredible 8 Anchors. You don’t always appreciate the preparation time that a speaker will put into creating a sessions! The Anchors would have also taken time to be trained, to prepare and also on the day to make each speaker feel comfortable. Thank you to you all!

THE SPONSORS

To pull off a conference of this size (and keep it free for all attendees) you are going to need the backing of several sponsors to help out in a variety of ways.

CHRIS DANCY AND NICK KELLETT

These guys gave us the idea and shared previous experiences to point us in the right direction at the start.

JON MANDERVILLE

I also managed to coax one of my best mates (Jon Manderville) to come in and do the Project Management for us at a time when we desperately needed it. He did this without a moment’s hesitation as a favour to me and stuck with us to the bitter end in that war room counting in each and every session. (I think he is now bitten by the Virtual Conference bug as he can’t wait to do the next one!)

TORSTEN MANDELKOW

Torsten is a developer by day, but a budding 3D video / graphic design artist by night. He created the most amazing trailer to introduce SP24. To see his work, check out the ‘SP24 Trailer‘.

THE COMPANY COLLEAGUES…

My fellow colleagues at Collaboris have been so helpful and supportive. They have not only covered for me on my normal ‘day to day’ Collaboris tasks, but have also jumped on board to help get SP24 ready on time.

THE FAMILIES

For me personally, without “The Wife” (Helen) being there to lift a stressed out overworked me off the floor, it would not have been possible. She has always been my rock and hopefully always will be! Where possible, our two children (Hannah & Katie) helped out, so they knew why daddy was spending so long sitting in front of the PC shouting at various SP24 bugs! My parents and In-laws also helped out on numerous occasions proof reading material and providing words of comfort and encouragement at just the right times!

RIOLINX

The guys from Riolinx (Raphael and Adrian) went above and beyond. Riolinx not only licensed their Extranet product for us (Extradium for SharePoint), but also spent time to integrate CometChat into SharePoint. Big Thanks for their help!

HUGH WOOD

Hugh provided the fabulous ‘Heat Map’ we used on the conference website, highlighting where all delegates were logging in from. He stayed with the team for the entire week helping fix bugs the night before the conference and generally keeping us all motivated throughout the experience.

BALA MURUGAN

During a last weekend emergency, Bala gave up his entire weekend to help build the ‘Session Planner’.

ANDY TALBOT, BILL AYERS AND NEIL WALKER

These 3 guys all gave time and help by joining us in the War Room. Each one helped in their own valuable way, ranging from anchoring and presenting sessions to bringing the beers and burgers!

FPWEB.NET

As mentioned earlier, without Fpweb.net there wouldn’t have been an SP24 hosted on SharePoint, they believed in the concept and charged full steam ahead with us to pull off what we the 2^nd biggest SharePoint Conference in the world.

THE SP24 TEAM …

Last but not least, there’s no way whatsoever I could have done this alone. So many of the team made big sacrifices to their daily routines just to pull this together. Matthias and Paul were the legends of the speakers and anchors and also managed to prepare and produce sessions for 24 hours consecutively in that war room. That was an amazing effort on its own. Jasjit Chopra, for his TLC of the platform and anything that sounded “sysadmin’y”, Stefan Bauer for tidying up my CSS and helping me develop the Conference site. Also thanks to Vlad Catrinescu for managing to convince the sponsors that SP24 is a worthwhile project!

The post An SP24 Adventure – The Thank you’s appeared first on Collaboris.

This post is part of a series of posts about the SP24 Virtual SharePoint Conference

SP24 was a free, virtual, SharePoint Conference that took place on April 14th and was then replayed on May 16th. It lasted for 24 hours and featured 98 SharePoint sessions from the world’s best and most famous speakers. We opened our virtual doors to nearly 8000 SharePoint professionals from a mind blowing 193 countries! (I am really proud we reached so many countries as this was one of our major goals when we set out).

Now that the conference is over, I am now trying to share as much information about it as time permits, partly to share this unique experience, but also so I don’t forget it! I had always fancied writing a book, but knew I wouldn’t have the patience to do it, so for me, SP24 was my book.

The SP24 Conference site was built on SharePoint Foundation 2013 hosted by Fpweb.net and required a lot of custom development to provide the features we needed to run a virtual conference. As we obviously wanted to minimise the amount of development we did, we looked to other products and services to fill in the functionality gaps we had identified. Here’s a list of what we ended up using.

Extradium – User Management in SharePoint based in SQL

To run a virtual conference you need a way for users to sign-up, log-in and manage their profiles etc. You also need a way to manage users, do password resets and update their details etc. There was absolutely no way we could build all this from scratch so we turned to Raphael Londner (CEO of Riolinx) who develops a very cool FBA Extranet product called Extradium for SharePoint. Extradium did everything we wanted and more!

I would also like to take this opportunity to say thanks to Raphael! He not only allowed us to use his product, but also helped out in many other ways as an active team member. In fact, his 2nd major focus was to integrate CometChat (a fully featured PHP chat app) into SharePoint so that logged in users could chat with each other and the speakers!

DocRead – Gets users to read and confirm documents in SharePoint

I was delighted to find a lot of uses for DocRead on SP24. DocRead allows you to assign key documents / list items to SharePoint groups, audiences, users and AD Groups. Using DocRead we were able configure documents such as the ‘Conference Guide’ to go out to ‘all attendees’ and the ‘Speakers Recording Tips’ to the ‘Speakers Group‘. The most beautiful part about the whole process (if I say so myself), is what we often refer to as ‘SmartMove’. Once you set a document to be assigned to a ‘Required Audience’, you can sit back, chill out and do something more interesting! As soon as new people get put into the group (which happened automatically with Extradium), DocRead will assign new Reading Tasks to those users. It will also give them a set number of days to complete the task before automatically sending a reminder! (To see this in action, sign up for a free account at SP24 and we will allocate you some reading to do without lifting a finger).

DocSurvey – Test understanding and get forms filled

DocSurvey is an enhanced SharePoint Survey that allows you to create quizzes and also add video / images to questions. The really powerful part occurs when DocSurvey is configured against the same document as DocRead. This turns into a very useful workflow! By simply doing this it means that when the user comes to confirm the document they can also be required to pass a test (or fill in a survey). If you have set a pass rate and they don’t achieve it they fail the test and they can’t confirm or complete the task! In fact, this is exactly what we used to get Speakers to not only agree to the Speaker terms of SP24 but also allowed us to gather all the information we needed from them. This was again a big time saver.

>> Watch our SP24 Video

SPCAF – Warns you about issues with your custom code!

As we had to develop a substantial amount of code (more than we originally expected) to make SP24 work as we wanted, we needed to make sure that we didn’t have any security leaks, used only SharePoint Foundation features and and also followed best practices. To help find these issues early, we utilized the SharePoint Code Analysis Framework (SPCAF) developed by my co-organizer Matthias Einig. It’s good to work with people who have excellent products

I can honestly say that this allowed us to find and fix issues before we even got to the testing phase, saving us a lot of troubleshooting time. Because much coding for SP24 involved JavaScript, Matthias also slipped me a copy of the latest beta (v5), which checks about 150 JavaScript/CSOM coding practices as well as the normal 400 plus rules for full trust SharePoint solutions.

>> If you develop code in SharePoint grab a trial

CometChat – A chat browser-based Chat Application

Ok we had to buy this one, but it cost so little you barely notice it! Cometchat is built using PHP and allows you to do pretty much everything you want in a chat client. We didn’t buy the full ‘Rolls Royce’ solution as we were worried about the performance overhead of running all those extra goodies in our SharePoint Farm. However, we ended up moving it to Azure anyway simply because we had some free MSDN credits and it’s a no brainer to spread the load of all these services.

If you want to see CometChat in action (within SharePoint), go to any Session Room and look to the right for the chat window. Raphael did an amazing job for us as he was able to get it all seamlessly integrated with the Extradium log-on.

>> CometChat Site

BindTuning.com – templates that allow you brand SharePoint

BindTuning offer pre-baked templates that allow you to brand SharePoint. We pretty much based the look and feel of the white site on on of their templates. Stefan Bauer then optimised the CSS simply to strip out all the styles we didn’t need. This lowered the overall size of the CSS file going over the wire.

>> Check out the themes

Kendo UI  – set of HTML 5 controls to build pages

If you are a developer and haven’t checked out Kendo UI – you should! It’s really very cool. It’s built by Telerik and is basically a suite of widgets all built using HTML 5.0 and CSS (no server code at all). They have everything from grids, to sliders. In particular I took advantage of the tab strip, notifications and grid extensively.

>> Read about Kendo UI

Kendo MVVM – javascript framework which reduces code

Along with the widgets described above they also have their own MVVM Framework which is similar to Knockout. For SP24 I considered using Knockout and AngularJS but plumped for Kendo MVVM in the end. The main reason being that I didn’t know any of them in-depth and Telerik’s MVVM framework obviously works really well with their own widgets. After using, it I would recommend it, it’s really simple and removes the need for all of that plumbing code to set and monitor the data in the HTML.

>> MVVM Documentation

SignalR – push “messages” down to browsers

You may not know, but SignalR literally saved the first SP24 conference. We discovered a CloudFlare caching configuration on sessions that had to be re-scheduled. Literally the week before the conference, I had learnt SignalR, wired it into the Session Room, hosted it on Azure and created an Admin page to remote control the session rooms. The intent at that time was to use it for live sessions, where we had a connectivity problem with the Speaker. In this instance I wanted to be able to swap out the live feed with the video back up without having to tell people in the chat room to do a full page refresh. As it turns out we used SignalR to push down messages to the player a whole lot more than we expected (including the Keynote). This is worth a whole blog post on it’s own as it really is a story to tell!

>> SignalR Site

CloudFlare.com – a CDN that saves I/O on SharePoint

In the weeks running up to the conference, our big worry was scale. We were getting lots of sign-ups and the ‘buzz’ surrounding SP24 grew. We needed to make sure that it would scale. One of the biggest challenges for SharePoint Foundation boxes can simply be dealing with a large number of I/O requests. For that I mean things like transferring images, js, css, pages, documents and all the other goodies from the SP database down the clients browser. In Foundations big brother, you can easily take advantage of blob caching and page output caching, but this wasn’t available to us. In my search for a solution I discovered Cloudflare.com which acts effectively like a reverse proxy in front of SharePoint. All you need to do is point your DNS to Cloudflare.com’s nameservers and it will then intercept every request. In a few clicks you can easily get it to cache and compress most assets such as JavaScript, CSS, Images and also JSON files in our case.

WARNING! Although, it does an amazing job at protecting SharePoint (up to 60% of all requests for us), it does have periods where it’s on “go-slow”. It’s also very easy to ‘over cache’ something, so take care on what and when you cache.

>> CloudFlare Site

Windows Azure – Cloud services that can scale really easily!

I know the description is only a drop in the ocean of what Windows Azure can do. This was pretty much my first time using Windows Azure properly. (Late to the party or what!). I have got to say, sometime MS produce applications / services that are lacking and sometimes they produce very sweet ones. I think Azure is amazing! We used it to host CometChat on a VM and on the big day we were able to pump up the box size in seconds.

We also used their Cloud Services for all of the SignalR code. The most impressive thing for me (being a developer), is the speed with which it deploys. It really is very cool and I am so excited about starting to move the DocRead and DocSurvey engines to it this summer!

>> Get free trial of Azure

Visual Studio Load Testing – performance testing

We also used Visual Studio Load Testing to hit SP24 with some serious load and were able to utilise test agents hosted in Azure. I wasn’t actually involved in any of this set-up but please have a chat with Jasjit Chopra from Penthara Technologies for more information as he led this area.

>> Read more about loading testing

Fpweb.net – host SharePoint in a Private Cloud!

Finally, last but certainly not least comes Fpweb.net. Fpweb.net hosted the entire platform for us and also ended up scaling it to a very hefty 3 Server Farm ready for the big day. I have to say that although they donated the entire Farm to the SP24 cause, they still treated us as a paying customer. Their support engineers are both knowledgeable and extremely helpful. The whole way through the relationship has been amazing and without Fpweb.net SP24 wouldn’t have happened! So, if you are looking to move part or all of your business to a Private Cloud and require a greater degree of customization than perhaps Office 365 can offer – get in touch with the folks at Fpweb.net!!

That’s all folks!

I hope this post helps you get some background into how we put SP24 together! As always, any questions please post a comment below.

CheersMark

The post 3rd Party apps and services that we used to build SP24 on SharePoint appeared first on Collaboris.

This post is part of a series of posts about the SP24 Virtual SharePoint Conference

By October 2013, we had built SPCOM to nearly 4000 members, and the LinkedIn group which I moderate contained around 29,000. We knew we had a good reach to tell people about SP24, but we had no accurate way of saying how many of these would attend. We began to mention the conference in a few posts in October and received favourable responses, so we knew we would generate some interest, but how much? We had to guess, albeit an educated one, but still a guess.

The virtual doors opened on Christmas Eve 2013

Registration opened on Christmas Eve 2013. We had opted for a ‘soft’ launch over the Christmas period just to make sure we the registration process was all working well. However, we were pleasantly surprised – I was automatically emailed when someone registered and my phone began to ping at a satisfying steady rate (I was soon told in no uncertain terms to silence my phone and concentrate on my family instead!).

We need more power Scotty!

As people began to register all through the start of 2014 we knew that the idea was taking off and we would need to go back to Fpweb again, “cap in hand” to ask for more servers. After a couple more meetings, we ended up with a platform that was really well scaled and had some impressive CPU and memory ‘Grunt’ behind it. Fpweb.net gave us 2 WFE’s, 1 SQL Server which works well for their larger customers.

If you are interested in the platform, please click the link below to see what we ended up with.

Software that we used to build the SP24 Conference Site

To create the conference platform we had a strict ‘beg not build’ policy. The theory being that if we could license some software in return for some promotion, then this would save us having to write even more code.

Sponsors to the rescue!

Our need for sponsors arose when we realised that there was not a hope in hell that we could manage the logistics of the conference remotely. We had team members located around the world and managing the live conference with us all on our own in different locations was going to be too difficult. A centralised location would make things easier, and also provide comfort in numbers. We decided to create a “war room” in Leeds, UK with a stable ultra-fast network connection. As we needed help to fund this, our “Vladministrator” (Vlad Catrinescu) put together a sponsor’s package and ran a ‘call for sponsors’. As we didn’t expect a great uptake (new conference, new format, crazy idea, etc.), we were once again blown away by the willingness for certain companies to “take a punt”. Metalogix, Riolinx, Rencore, Penthara, Collaboris, Fpweb.net, SPDockit, Axioworks and SharePoint-Videos.com, thank you so much and please give yourself a big pat on the back! You also made this happen and believed in us. Seriously, thank you! (Same again next time?)

You can’t have a conference without speakers – lots of them :)

As the organization evolved by the end of January – I wasn’t massively involved in Speaker management. I left all that to our Speaker chaperones Matthias and Paul. The “Call for speakers” was done by creating 2 List.ly lists – One for the ‘business track’, and one for the ‘technical track’. We were also able to embed and host them on SP24Conf.com which worked pretty nicely! As List.ly has all of the goodies you need (such as voting, sharing, photos and different views) it is very flexible.

List.ly was cool for the voting process, but we did find it tricky getting all of the selected speakers’ details into SharePoint for Speaker, Sessions, Sponsor, etc. To solve this problem, I used DocRead and DocSurvey.  To achieve this we added all of the Speakers into a SharePoint Group, called ‘Speakers’ and then assigned the ‘Speakers Guide’ to them (which also contained some information that we needed the Speaker to agree to). We then created a SharePoint Survey with DocSurvey that asked the Speaker about their session experience and other information that we needed for the conference! The last part was to configure the survey against the ‘Speakers Guide’ and also require that the speakers completed it, for which we used DocRead. Once this was checked in and published, all that Matt and Paul had to do was add the speakers to the group and then view the responses as they came in. On the whole this worked well – and it was a great ‘dogfooding’ exercise for me as we have now improved both products as a result of it!

On the whole, I think the Speakers enjoyed being slapped about by DocRead:

The Anchors were amazing!

We managed to bribe 8 Anchors to introduce the live sessions in the original SP24 event and they all did a fantastic job. They were terrific, really natural and at ease, they asked great questions and made the Speakers feel at ease despite some of them not having either used the technology before or having performed this type of role before. We can’t thank them enough! This format is something we would like to use again for SP24 2015!

Special thanks to all these Anchors who were a massive help:

• Andy Talbot
• Brad Shannon
• Christian Buckley
• Debbie Ireland
• Kanwal Khipple
• Karauna Gatimu
• Melanie Nelson
• Rick Ho

Just before those long 24 hours!!

The build-up to the big day was frantic; By early April I was having daily panic attacks about whether the platform would scale and work in most browsers. We had done some performance testing and functional testing, but nowhere near enough (is there ever enough time!). I was still writing code the day before the conference and fixing the bugs in the war-room literally just before the conference started. It was pressure like I hadn’t felt in a long time… if ever. To know that half of the SharePoint world was going to descend on something you had built in a matter of a few weeks was something else!

We packed our children off to stay with Granny and Grandad for a few days and welcomed Hugh Wood (from Scotland) and Matthias Einig (from Sweden) in their place (notice the cleaning product and cloth on the cabinet!) As I was still fixing code, I sent Helen to pick up Matthias from Manchester airport – who literally had to find a man she had never met before who we all agreed looked nothing like his photo! She later joked that if she hadn’t found him she was going to bring home the cutest guy she could find instead.

The post An SP24 Adventure – Putting it all together appeared first on Collaboris.

Here are 98 free, awesome, eye-watering SharePoint sessions from SP24

This post is part of a series of posts about the SP24 Virtual SharePoint Conference:

Over the last 12 months Collaboris have been heavily involved in developing and organizing a free, virtual SharePoint Conference called SP24 that went out to over 7500 attendees. SP24 originally took place on 16th April 2014 and lasted for 24 hours. We featured many of the world’s most famous SharePoint Speakers including Senior Product Managers from both the SharePoint (Bill Baer) and Office 365 (Jeremy Thake) product teams. As the conference lasted for an entire 24 hours it wasn’t possible for many to sit through all of the sessions. To get a 2nd chance – on 14th May we ran SP24 Rewound, which replayed the entire conference in reverse order. This gave the attendees another chance to enjoy the SharePoint sessions in real-time along with other attendees and also the speakers themselves!

Now that both conferences are complete every single session is now available to watch at your leisure, on-demand. This boils down to completely free SharePoint training to anyone with an internet connection.

To watch the sessions you need to grab a free account (the main reason for this is because we use DocRead to assign recommended reading to Session SharePoint groups). This means that once you are in a session you will automatically given access to the slides and code samples shared by the speaker’s. This is all consolidated in your ‘My SP24 Resources’ reading list.

So … what are you waiting for, check out the sessions below, use the ‘Tags’ to filter and start learning SharePoint from the best!

The post Here are 98 free, awesome, eye-watering SharePoint sessions from SP24 appeared first on Collaboris.

This post is part of a series of posts about the SP24 Virtual SharePoint Conference:

SP24 was the world’s largest, on-line, SharePoint virtual Conference. We welcomed a staggering 7600 avid SharePoint fans through the virtual SP24 conference doors. Collaboris were heavily involved in pulling the conference together and were specifically responsible for building the platform on SharePoint 2013 Foundation. Why not take a look behind the scenes with Helen Jones who discusses how we organised and managed the conference?

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The post Managing SP24 – A sneak peak behind the scenes appeared first on Collaboris.

This post is part of a series of posts about the SP24 Virtual SharePoint Conference:

The big day – Conference time!

The build-up on the day of the big ‘go live’ gradually got more stressful as it progressed. We were behind on tasks such as sending out the necessary reminders and testing! Our biggest mishap was that we hadn’t recorded our opening intro to kick of the conference. We had been planning if for a few days, but no one had any time to write out what we wanted to say, or how we were going to do it. Jon Manderville eventually wrote the script at 9pm (2 hours before live) which we were going to record on camera. After the first couple of tests we were interrupted because of a near fire in the war room. (During the day we had inadvertently wrapped a curtain around a light bulb which after it had been turned on at night was beginning to melt the curtain and send out smoke!). Once that craziness was out of the way, Paul Gallagher told us we had one ‘take’ go to get it right – and he wasn’t lying. Finally, at 10:58pm (2 minutes before live), Paul had managed to get the video uploaded and mastered into YouTube. As we had no time to test it, the first time we saw it was when the world did! (That video is now locked away never to be seen again!) We also used a remote control player I had developed, which allowed us to push out the intro to all attendees which worked really well! Once that was complete, we then pushed out Bill Baers live session to start his keynote. After that we could relax for about 5 minutes. From then on we had a minimum of 4 concurrent sessions running in each of the following 24 hours (with 2 live sessions in each hour).

Monsieurs Einig (Producer) and Talbot (Anchor)

It was a pretty stressful experience and was very interesting to see how all the guys reacted. Even Paul – Mr chilled out Gallagher – was showing signs of strain.

Paul and Matthias – our heroes of the Hangouts!

By the time the Conference started, only 2 of the team had learned Google Hangouts well enough to manage it. We always knew this was not enough but again time got to us. The plan was to get these two guys to train other team members, but we hadn’t also realised that 1) They’d have no time, and 2) the other team members were either dealing with technical support and re-scheduling last minute changes to the agenda. We also had a team monitoring the chat rooms from their bases in India (Jasjit Chopra), Austria (Stefan Bauer) and Canada (Vlad Catrinescu). Against all the odds, and quite unbelievably, Paul and Matthias produced nearly EVERY single session for the entire 24 hours – Pretty incredible! How they stayed sharp enough I’ll never know. They did get some relief when Andy Talbot turned up to the room (with some very welcome refreshments!). Andy was anchoring for 6 hours so was also able to take care of the production for one live track!

5-4-3-2-1 and Go

Religiously, before every single session Jon played time keeper. With 10 minutes to go, he’d stand up and shout “10 minutes left boys, 10 minutes“. This would cause Paul and Matthias to stir into action so they could inform the Anchors that they needed to nudge the current Speaker to finish up and also start to warm up the new ones. Then – when the new session was ready for live, Jon would count down from 10 seconds to 1 and Paul and Matthias would push the session live. I know everyone appreciated having some structure each hour, but to this day we were never quite sure when to start the countdown. If you don’t know, Google Hangouts Live, will automatically have a random buffered delay and this will also vary by a couple of seconds around the world. Adding this into the mix (along with different browsers clocks) made it a challenge at the start and also caused us a lot of laughter by the end.

Speakers live from the ‘War Room’

A couple of the Speakers actually presented their sessions live from the War Room. Hugh Wood (who had already been with us from the day before) managed (after being awake the entire night), to deliver an amazing session on SharePoint and Javascript.

We also had Bill Ayers join us towards the end of the day who delivered a session and then hung around with us until the bitter end!

Things to improve next time!

We learnt a couple of lessons to take into the next conference (in fact we already improved and fixed them in SP24 Rewound). The first thing that we realised wasn’t working well was showing the Trailers before every single session. I regretted that as soon as the feedback started coming in. We even had a fix ready on the night, but Jon – being the PM he is – wouldn’t let us implement it! (Pah – the cheek!). However, given the tiredness and risk factors this was probably a very wise decision.

There were also a couple of sessions that had no sound. This was a genuine mistake, we had checked all of the videos before uploading to Youtube and spot checked a few afterwards. As it turns out they all need to be checked as YouTube will encode them on upload which may or may not work :(. Where time permitted, we re-uploaded and rescheduled during the night.

We also had a couple of snags with the Hangouts we had pre-prepared before hand. If a speaker accessed the Hangout before Matthias or Paul did, it caused us problems. This meant we had to update some of the session information, which of course had knock-on caching issues.

We did it!

Against all of the odds, we managed to pull it off! We ran the biggest on-line SharePoint Conference that had taken place and entertained delegates from a staggering 193 countries! On the whole the feedback we received was awesome with only a smattering of grumbles. Here’s a sample:

The Good

“All of the organizers can pour something nice into their glass, sit back and say that they have done a large thing in their life. This event is a cherry on top of a cake that show what a great community is supporting and thriving Sharepoint. Holding an online event seems to me much more difficult and risky than physical conference and I’m amazed how smooth all the sessions where. I salute the organizers and everyone who attended.”

“The goal of a conference is to permit participants to find new and interesting information and to interact with presenters. Your great conference achieve this. However, I am sure there is a big number of attendees which were not able to attend how much they wanted to attend. And this is because of 24 hours format. Once the sessions will be online I will attend all of them, but interaction with presenters will be lost. By the way, the chat should be available as it contains important real life information. Many thanks again for your great effort.”

“Great speakers, great online format, and very well executed. I was also very glad to have the rewound opportunity a month later. Having the times shifted allowed me to attend some other sessions that were too late in the day for me the first time around. Overall, VERY happy with SP24 and SP24 Rewound. Hope you do it again in 2015.”

“How come a virtual conference could create such a buzz here in our own office and then make us rush home to catch the rest of the sessions from our sofa. I know…because it rocked! What a fantastic idea. Quality content, great atmosphere, outstanding organisation. I learned tonnes of new SharePoint knowledge and I felt at one with the worldwide SharePoint community. We are still addicted to the site, writing up our notes, ideas, thoughts about what we learned on our own internal SharePoint blog to help with our strategy, governance and solution support. Can’t wait for SP24 Rewound so I can catch up on the sessions I missed. It’s also a chance to get another SP24 fix! I can’t believe this was all free and the after service you are providing by leaving the site up and having the rewound sessions is great. In fact, I wouldn’t even mind paying a fee to attend this conference in the future if you weren’t able to do it again for free – it was that good!”

The Bad

“I am not a fan of watching after hours.”

“Keep national access limitations in mind and inform your attendees prior to the event.”

“The second time it worked better. The first time I could not join sessions due to the trailers.”

The Funny

“Have Hugh Wood wear something silky”

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This post is part of a series of posts about the SP24 Virtual SharePoint Conference.

During the last session, I distinctly remember how desperate I was for it to end. Missing a whole night’s sleep and enduring so many emotions throughout the conference was really exhausting. When the last sessions were complete, we had to clear out the war room, which was like walking in mud. Once that challenge was complete, we headed over to the hotel, checked in and managed to talk the porter into giving us a well earned drink. We all sat down, reflected, pondered and collectively said ‘Never again’! (Until the following morning;)

The conference in numbers

• It was the world’s largest online conference and the 2nd largest SharePoint ‘offline’ conference, only beaten by Microsoft themselves.
• We had 7826 registered attendees.
• Representing 193 countries around the globe.
• Bill Baer’s, Session Room has been viewed over 3,200 times (at the time of writing).
• The first run of the conference site received 155,000 page views: Fpweb.net can really scale
• We had 98 sessions with eye-watering SharePoint content.
• 70% of attendees said they enjoyed the 24-hour format, although,
• 88% of attendees attended 8 or less sessions.
• DocRead assigned 69,233 Tasks to various speakers and attendees.

Will there be an SP24 2015?

Up until about 90 minutes after it was all over, we were all in total agreement; Never again – stupid idea. However…. after a nice glass of wine and reading some of the reaction on Twitter, we slowly came around to the “hell yeah, that was fun!” idea. Next time though, we’d need to do it differently – we’ve learnt a lesson. It has to fund itself. Doing something like SP24 as a purely voluntary effort is way too much to take on and still have a life. I guess we didn’t make it easy on ourselves; somehow we went from 24 sessions to over 100 scheduled (with 2 live tracks). We probably could have done it without SharePoint and just hit YouTube. We didn’t have to put Chat, Twitter feeds, Resources, Session Rooms, Planners and so on. But hey, we’re geeks, and geeks like to play with tech!

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