The SharePoint Asia Pacific 2007 conference that was in Sydney is a wrap. 

The three days I was at the conference went so fast. Angus Logan and his team from Microsoft Australia did a remarkable job of co-ordinating the event. Here are some stats from the conference. Thanks to Ryan for giving me the opportunity to speak.

• Over 600 attendees from all over Asia Pacific and as far as Sri Lanka (Dhammika Weerakoon from Millenium IT)
• Over 60 sessions in 2 days
• Over 45 presenters from the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
• One big “Yeehaw SharePoint” party – Photos on Flickr
• Best attendee of the conference – Paul Quirk of Intergen he attended 18 sessions in two days including a lunch time sessions – good on ya mate!
• Mike Fitz, Jason Morrill and some others including myself had a few ‘demo’ problems because of our laptops crashin!
• Amount of coffee, energy drinks and beer consumed unknown J
• Over 15 stands on the partner pavilion showcasing third party and add-on products and solutions built on SharePoint (More about the cool solutions later)
• Joel Oleson can stack up 4 empty Redbull cans on top of a tea pot and two ashtrays and 4 placemats (see photo below)
• Ryan was Mr fixit and first on call for demo recoveries when required!
• Best Pie in Australia is at “Pie Face” near Darlinghurst Street!

I had such a blast and met so many awesome people that have been true SharePoint evangelists from way back. Andrew Connell is an awesome presenter! We need you for TechEd New Zealand.

This was my first time live presenting to an (international) audience of over 100 people. So, I was a bit nervous to say the least. My session was rather technical with a few demos titled “UX 01 Customisation Guided Tour through HTML, CSS and Master Page resources” (I didn’t choose the title)

From the presentation side of things my presentation started with a minor hiccup. Basically, my laptop refused to start up when I went to my session room and plugged it in. No power no nothing nada! Panic set in momentarily. Luckily, I had Ari with me who was scheduled to present with me later on the second session. So, I used his laptop and setup my external HDD VPC image demo via his laptop. It took a bit of fiddling to get the display sorted.

Overall, even after the false start, I felt that I started with my presentation very well up to the point of the second demo of showing the CSS options and how SharePoint designer can be used to customise a WSS site’s look and feel took a nasty turn. Basically, SharePoint Designer went into a ‘hissy fit’ and just did not respond at all.

I was midpoint saving a style sheet and overriding the default site CSS control link and boom it crashed. It took about 5-7 mins for me to recover from that. I have to thank my audience very much for being so patient. Rest of the presentation went OK.

I was able to show the Master Page and Page layout I created despite SharePoint Designer crashing again. I felt that I it was a bit rushed, and I had very slow response from SharePoint Designer for the final part of the demo.

Next week I will be doing the same session at the Wellington SharePoint User Group event and hopefully I’ll have no issues with my demos. So please come along to Intergen if you are in town. More details here

Ari and I had our upgrading WSS sites and site templates to WSS v3 session at 2.25 the same day. We were able to run an in place upgrade while we did the presentation and even had about 5 mins left over. Go to Ari’s blog for more information.

The Sydney SharePoint UG had a session on day 2 with Mike Fitz, Andrew Connell and Joel Oleson in attendance. There were about 70 people there. Head over to Ivan Wilson’s blog for more information. I have photos on Flickr.

Out of the partner pavilion the guys from Nintex had some very cool Workflow tools which was built on top of SharePoint. Check out Nintex Worklfow 2007 and the Nintex PodCast Server here. http://www.nintex.com/products.aspx

If you wanted ‘heavy’ enterprise workflow then K2 Blackpearl is what you are after. http://www.k2.net/bp/Default.aspx

So many cool things and a great time networking with a lot of partners and peers from all around APAC!