For the very first time Microsoft Bangladesh and SharePoint Experts Community jointly organized Microsoft SharePoint Community Day 2012. SharePoint is not a very old technology term in Bangladesh but the response of the event was remarkable. Specially the manifestation from Enterprise and Government sector customers.
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Our intention was to share success stories, career opportunities and platform offerings to the audience. Target audience were both IT Pro and Developers. We were worried about mixing up both audiences! But thanks to the community leads who handled it very well; though some said “the event was mainly focused on advertising SharePoint to the corporate people” on our Facebook event page.
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Here is a summary of the event for you-
We were very fortunate to have Lutful Khandker, Azure Architect Evangelist from Microsoft Corp. among us. He came to visit Bangladesh for personal reasons but when he learned about the event, he was also very excited to meet the local community and see the response. He started the event with some practice and success stories of US and the world. He invited the developers to explore the platform and play with it, which might lead them to a very healthy career in future.
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After that MJ Ferdous from Brain Station 23 came on the stage with his session “SharePoint 2010 Overview and Introduction.” He tried to make the audience understand what SharePoint is, what are the benefits of using SharePoint. He almost answered 20 questions from the audiences, which was quite surprising.
Rakib Hasan from GrameenPhone IT came with his presentation “SharePoint as an Enterprise Solution” after the first coffee break. The response was HUGE on this session. Because we invited customers who bought SharePoint license and never implemented them, Rakib answered many of their queries too.
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Microsoft MVP Tanzim Saqib came with his presentation “Office 365: Be a SaaS/Cloud Developer Now and Start Selling Apps.” Office 365 is not available in Bangladesh but as Bangladeshi IT market is very much focused on outsourcing jobs from US/Europe, so this is to show the developers the opportunities available up there.
Md. Sofiuzzaman, Licensing Specialist from Microsoft Bangladesh highlighted the licensing side of SharePoint after lunch break. Most of the Audience didn’t have any knowledge on licensing and this session helped them to understand licensing. Many were surprised to learn about free SharePoint foundation.
Now the SharePoint magician speaker Mark Miller comes, who is the founder and editor of EndUserSharePoint.com. No he didn’t come all the way from New York; Microsoft Lync saved the money and we did the presentation online. The title of his presentation was “To Host or Not to Host: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Decisions” and after watching his presentation, I must say, Mark is really a magician. One moment he makes the audience confuse and the other moment he solves the confusion. I believe we do not have too many speakers like him in the industry. I’d like to take the privilege to quote one comment from one of the attendees on FaceBook-
One more session we did with Lync. Microsoft MVP Sohel Rana came with his presentation “SharePoint as Content Management System” from Denmark. His slot was for 30 minutes but he did the session for more than 1 hour because the question and answer session was very interesting.
Once again Tanzim Saqib came with his 2nd presentation “Hacking Office365 Online Services: SharePoint, Exchange, Lync. Oh my!” after the 2nd coffee break. Very interesting presentation for DEV audience.
After that “SharePoint 2010 Administration & Development” presentation was presented reciprocally by MJ Ferdous and Rabiul Islam from Microsoft Partner SoftwarePeople. This was VERY interesting session for the audience. The Q&A session was more than 30 minute long and the best part was, they were not the only one to answer the questions. By then some of the audiences started to answer other’s.
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Finally Microsoft MVP Ashraful Alam Joy came with his presentation “Utilizing SharePoint with TFS 2010.” But it was not the presentation. Joy is a very vocal speaker and all types of audience loves him for his career guidelines.
I’d like to say that the Q&A made the event so interesting. Finally a special thanks to Microsoft Bangladesh Family for their amazing support.
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We got very good response from media. Reporters from many national newspaper visited the event. Desh TV, Bijoy TV did news on the event and as Priyo.com was the E-Media partner of the event, they did live blogging on the event on their website.
Our concern was to make the community aware of SharePoint and after the event I believe we are more than successful with the presence of 350+ audience. And Finally we did a raffle draw and distributer WiMax Modems, Router and Windows Phone to the winners but all participants got colorful Windows Phone T-Shirts. And last but not least, event speakers were honored with crests.
Download the presentations:
- SharePoint 2010 Overview and Introduction
- SharePoint as an Enterprise Solution
- Office 365: An Overview for Software + Services/Cloud developers
- SharePoint Licensing
- To Host or Not to Host: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Decisions
- SharePoint as Content Management System
- SharePoint 2010 Administration & Development
- Utilizing SharePoint with TFS 2010