General Ramblings

If you are reading this...

Nick — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 21:47:00 GMT

Then you are missing out on content on my new blog!

The new blog url is:

http://sharepointnick.com/blog/default.aspx

And the new RSS feed you need to subscribe to is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/sharepointnick

See you on the other side!

Arrived in Seattle

Nick — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 12:31:00 GMT

I arrived in Seattle yesterday ready for the MVP summit. This is the first one I'm attending and I'm really excited about it. I've been swapping emails with many of the other SharePoint MVPs for around 12 months now and it'll be great to put faces to names. Most of all I'm looking forward to meeting Todd. We've been working on BDC Meta Man for around 8 months now I reckon, and have only spoken via messenger and phone.

I managed to stay awake the entire flight yesterday and the plan was to stay up till 10pm Seattle time but I gave up around 8pm (5am UK time). So I've ended up waking up at 5am local time which means I can spend some time working before getting breakfast. Yes I am here a couple of days early before the summit actually starts! But I thought it'd give me a little time to get used to the timezone change plus most of the other SharePoint MVPs are getting here on Sunday anyway so we'll be going out tonight. Hopefully I'll get lots of photo's up. Most the SharePoint MVPs are staying at the Crowne Plaza. The hotel is great and I've got a room on theh 18th floor which gives some interesting views!

SharePointNick.com

Nick — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 20:55:00 GMT

www.sharepointnick.com

This will be the new site very soon!

Make sure you are using the feedburner RSS feed and the move will be painless for you! Here it is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Vb-techWeblog

There's some 600 people that aren't using this so you better all update it now!

PC Graphics Card problems

Nick — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:19:00 GMT

Anyone else seen these problems while playing BF2142? It happens during the game as well as in the menus:

It seemed to only start happening after I installed company of heros, although I can't be sure!

Thanks for any help!

Blog title changed

Nick — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 05:35:00 GMT

Renaud Comte made a good point to me during the Berlin Conference that perhaps many people don't actually know who's writing this blog that you are reading! So I've changed the title of it to 'Nick Swan's SharePoint Blog'. Hopefully that should give you some kind of an idea!

I've also been tempted to register a normal looking domain just for this blog as well for a little while but I get so many hits of Google searches now I'm not sure I'd want to risk losing them! Plus of course there is the risk of people subscibed to the old RSS feed not following me. Which brings up another important point, if you are subscribed to the old feed, make sure you start using the new feedburner one located here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Vb-techWeblog

That way if I do move it will all be seemless for you. There's around 500 people who still use the old RSS feed so make sure you use the new one! :-)

Berlin SharePoint Conference day 2 + 3

Nick — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 19:46:00 GMT

Well day two and day three somehow got lost along the way so I've ended up writing this while waiting at Tegel airport for the flight home on day four.

Tuesday

Tuesday ended up being a really early start. On monday night I'd forgotten that I had signed up to be helping at the hands on labs from 8am to 10am. I managed to get there at 8:30 which wasn't too bad :-). All of the lab PCs were working now as well which was good news as from that point onwards the room was pretty full with a queue sometimes forming of people waiting to get on. The labs was a good place to meet up with the other MVPs as there was generally two or three were hanging around.

After my hands on labs duty Michael Greth interviewed me on BDC Meta Man for his SharePointPodCast.de. Thankfully the interview was in English! :-) I'll post a link to it when it's up on his website.

I attended Steve Smiths second session of the conference on Capacity Planning for SharePoint 2007. Really enjoyed this session as Steve gave away lots of real nuggets of things to think about when planning a deployment. The stress testing tool in VS 2005 looked really good as well although it seems a shame it's apparently only in the Software Testers Edition (didn't know that existed, or is it part of Team System?)

I managed to get some flowers ordered for valentines day which kept Sophie happy. I'd asked her to come to Berlin with me as being a teacher she had the week off for half term. She didn't want to though as she thought she'd be stuck at the hotel by herself all day. I only found out on the last day that a few other MVPs and attendees from the UK had bought their wives/girlfriends along. Next time I'll get Sophie to come as well.

The event in the evening for all the delegates was a suprise party so everyone piled into buses and headed off. People from the UK had a seperate area to congregate and drinks were kindly supplied by Artemis Corp. This was also the evening of the MVP dinner which we headed off to a little earlier and planned to join up with everyone else later. The place where we ended up eating though was around an hour away from the party so by midnight we realised it was too late to go across. Steve and I left around midnight as we were both pretty tired, but upon arriving on Wednesday we found out some people had managed to stay up drinking until 7am!

Here's Steve Smith, Stacy Draper, and Spencer Harbour. I'll let you guess which is which! :-)

Wednesday

I think three days is about the right length for a conference. Anything longer and I reckon people get a little fed up with it and start missing entire mornings/afternoons or may be even a day.

I managed to get my five minutes of presentation duties today. Mike Fitzmaurice asked me on Sunday if I'd like to come up and demo BDC Meta Man at the end of his session on Business Data Catalog. Mike was very kind in singing our apps praises before I'd even got up, and it was very nice that it got a round of applause when I showed how much xml was generated in the application definition file after just a few clicks. Afterwards quite a few people wanted to speak to me about the app which was great and I was at the Combined Knowledge stand most of the day so there was a trickle of people who were asking me questions. Here's a pic of me talking with the big video screen behind me

At 2pm it was time for the Combined Knowedge laptop draw! Tons of people turned up. A Sword colleague of mine, Deborah, had entered but actually left Berlin on Tuesday evening. You had to be here to win the laptop so I was going to pretend that it was her card that was pulled out. After the draw we actually realised her card was the next one on top so would her being chosen was very nearly the case.

After the final sessions of the day there was a little packing up to do, and then enjoying a few more beers with people at the hotel bar.

Overall I think the conference was great. The venue was brilliant (and massive), and there were so many staff organising and help the conference run smoothly. Thankfully everyone I met spoke English as well which was a great help. Thanks to everyone who came and said hello. It's nice meeting people who read your blog and encourage you to keep the writing going. Next conference I might be attending...TechEd perhaps in the US?

Landed in Berlin

Nick — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 09:47:00 GMT

Landed at Berlin and now sitting in my lovely hotel room. I can't believe there is snow here, it seems to be following me around at the moment.

Les Arcs -> Reading -> Aberdeen -> Reading -> Berlin. That's where I've been since around the 20th Jan and there's been snow in all these places.

Here's a pic of those crazy Germans playing football out in the snow. I love football, but not that much! :-)

And here's my nice hotel room at the Movenpick.

One thing I can't believe is the hotel price for broadband. 22 euros a day! T Mobile want £7.50 per megabyte for my 3g data card abroad. I really hope the conference centre has free wifi!

Flight Delays

Nick — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 05:28:00 GMT

I'm not having much luck with flights recently. Every single flight I've got this year so far has been delayed for one reason or another. Sat at Heathrow airport at 8:30am in the morning, time for some coffee I think! Can someone remind me why I booked such an early flight again please?!

Ready for Berlin?

Nick — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 20:23:00 GMT

Well it was quite an action packed week last week. I spent the first three days up in Aberdeen assisting a Sword business unit up there with a MOSS 2007 proposal. That was lots of fun as the company are really keen to get going with the product so it's great talking to people who are excited about it. I didn't get to see much of Aberdeen, but it was cold and there was snow on the ground all the time! So it wasn't any different when I got back and we had a ton of snow on Wednesday night!

Thursday was the SUGUK meeting with Lawrence Liu. Although we had the snow we still had around 70 people turn up which was great!

Now I'm ready and packed for the Berlin European SharePoint Conference! My flight is at 8am tomorrow morning (I'm still not sure why I asked for such an early one!), so I get to Berlin in the morning. I'll be staying at the Movenpick hotel in Berlin. I'll be trying to spend every minute of every day at the conference, and I'm helping out at the hands on labs which should be fun. If anybody wants to get in touch and meet up while over there just to say he, or perhaps chat about BDC Meta Man, feel free to drop me an email at nick.swan [at] sword-uk.com or give me a call on my mobile : +44 7725 960903

Aberdeen Next week

Nick — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:41:00 GMT

Speaking of traveling, I'm off to Aberdeen for the first part of next week so if any SharePointers live near there and fancy meeting up for a bite to eat drop me an email.