The maiden session of KochiSharePoint User Group met at Hexis Labs on Saturday, 16th June 2012. The User Group (UG) is formed with an objective to keep up with the burgeoning developments in Enterprise Collaboration space, there by providing a platform to share and learn the technologies and products associated with it; the UG also gives special emphasis on SharePoint, the flagship product from Microsoft on enterprise collaboration vertical.
The session started off with stimulating talk by Praseed Pai, the far-famed Software Consultant and Solutions Architect, he is also an avid blogger and speaker at many tech forums including K-MUG. He started off the session by talking about the changing landscape of custom software development which is giving out in favour of packaged software solutions in the enterprise space. He highlighted the some of key features required by every enterprise software and showed how Microsoft SharePoint features aligns with those. He concluded the talk by mentioning how .NET developers could take their career to the next level with SharePoint, by leveraging their existing ASP.NET skills and added how enterprises could save themselves from the phenomena of "Reinventing the Wheel" by adopting SharePoint as their Collaboration platform thereby cutting down risk associated with custom development.
The next session was by Abraham Peter, a senior SharePoint developer working for Ernst & Young. His session titled "Why & How SharePoint", covered SharePoint from business standpoint equating the six pillars of SharePoint with real life business scenarios and pointed how business could seamlessly streamline their operations using SharePoint. Next he covered how different variants of Document Management features of SharePoint how they stack up each other. In the last slides he covered how to start off with SharePoint development and various offerings by Microsoft and other third party providers to set up SharePoint development box. Later he demoed the cloud version of SharePoint development services from CloudShare.com
The final session was by Shalvin PD a renowned independent consultant and trainer in .Net and SharePoint technologies with years of experience. You can find him speaking at prominent tech events like Kerala Microsoft User Group, Community Tech Days and others. He started off with a straight dive into SharePoint by demoing how to provision some of the key features covered in the six pillars of SharePoint including Sites, Content and Communities. He covered a good ground on developing SharePoint solutions with Visual Webparts, Sandbox Webparts and covered Central Administration module there by giving the audience a feel of SharePoint development and its features.
We had a adhoc session by Ms.Nimisha, a SharePoint developer from Orion, she briefly covered what all to watch out for especially for developers coming to SharePoint from ASP.NET background. Her session covered topics including the changes that SharePoint makes when installing it to a machine, the SharePoint site hierarchy, sandbox solution and its relevance and many more. Her initiative to share her experiences was well appreciated by the UG.
The adhoc session was followed by the QA session, which was then followed by a self introduction of each and every member in the audience. It was exciting to see people attending the UG not just from development background but also from IT infrastructure services and academia too.
The SharePointKochi UG hosts would like to specifically thank each and everyone of you who turned up for the meet and made this UG initiative a success and thanks to those who wished to attend but couldn't turn up because of personal reasons. A special word of thanks to Hexis Labs for arranging the Infrastructure without which the event would have been made possible.
Thanks to God almighty.
Thanks to God almighty.
