Wow, so the week right after SharePoint Saturday Ozarks, I was off again to Baltimore. Here I would be meeting up with Eric Harlan and his Baltimore SharePoint Users Group for what was sure to be a superb event.
I left on Friday after only one minor flight snafu. My travel agency had mistakenly booked my flights to and back from Baltimore both on Sunday. Lucky for me, it wasn’t a full flight so they were able to fix this mistake quite easily. Thanks so much to a very friendly Southwest Airlines ticket counter staff for their help.
Once I hit Baltimore, I went to pick up my rental car and then on to my hotel. Dan Lewis had recomended this new hotel called Aloft for me to stay in. It was quite swanky and fun. I was glad to be there. The only problem that I had was that the hotel was right across the street from the Arundel Mills mall. Now for any of you not familiar with the Mills mall line, I am sorry. But come on boys, you can’t book a girl right across the street from a giant mall and expect her to not go. So after check in, with a few hours to kill off I was across the street to the mall.
After shopping for a little while it was on to the speaker dinner in the Inner Harbor of Baltimore. Driving to the dinner was a fun adventure. There was a really big soccer game happening at the Ravens stadium and there were people everywhere you looked in downtown Baltimore. But I made it to the restaraunt only a few minutes late. And boy was I glad that Eric and his crew had set up valet parking for us. It kept me from being even more late.
The dinner was wonderful and I had a great time meeting everyone and hanging out. There were so many twitter faces there that I could finally put tweets with actual people. The only downside was that I can never find enough time to get around and actually chat with each speaker. I did get to briefly chat with Dux, Susan Lennon, and Dan Usher at dinner.
After dinner, the intrepid group decided to go out and see what Baltimore had to offer us. It was a great time and led to a dance floor attack on one of our crew. I had such a good time just hanging out with the guys and getting to know them.
The next day it was time for the SharePoint Saturday event. After getting to the event, I had a little while before my session was scheduled. I made a point to attend and live blog Mark Miller’s (endusersharepoint.com) session. It was convienent for me as his session was right before mine in the same room. It was a great session and I learned a lot about some no code graph solutions.
Then it was on my own session. I think it went pretty well. I had some great questions from the crowd. The only problem was again Virtual Machine drama. I am working on fixing this by putting my VM in the cloud too. I am tired of it crashing right before each session.
Here is my session from SharePoint Saturday Baltimore.
After the day was over, we all headed to SharePint for some good times and the social hour aspect of SharePoint Saturday Baltimore. Dan Usher, Dan Lewis, Mike Watson and I detoured to the hotel first. By the time we got to the SharePint location, the power had gone out due to a thunderstorm. So it was off to a new location and to find some Baltimore crab cakes downtown.
The crew ended up being a lively bunch on Saturday night: Joel Oleson, Michael Noel, Fabian Williams, and many others joined in for our dinner excursion and some people even continued on the evening with us for the party after.
All in all, SharePoint Saturday Baltimore was a great event full of wonderful people, lots of SharePoint information and good times. I was glad to put a lot of faces with twitter names and to meet so many new people.
I am looking forward to my next trip and meeting more people and talking and learning more about SharePoint again.
