Speaking Engagements

It’s good to talk – I love SharePoint and I love to talk, sometimes even about SharePoint ;-) Following are some events where you can hear me talking, mostly about SharePoint!

I also run the Channel Islands SharePoint User Group – I am working on an Office365 website for that; but in the meantime please feel free to join the LinkedIn group. Next event is 9th Feb 2012 (I’m not speaking, just organising it but we have a great line-up please come along if you are local, or even if you are not!)

February 26th 2012 – British Computer Society (BCS Jersey)

Automating User Interface Testing
When, why and how to implement Automated UI Testing for improved quality and reduced human testing effort in the development of web applications (SharePoint included!). A number of options for creating, running, monitoring and measuring automated UI tests as part of the development lifecycle will be presented. Load Testing options and web-based solutions to assist will also be demonstrated.

March 20th 2012 – C5 Alliance Breakfast Briefing (Pomme d’Or Hotel, Jersey)

Business Intelligence & SharePoint 2010 

March 21st 2012 – C5 Alliance Breakfast Briefing (The Old Government House, Guernsey)

Business Intelligence & SharePoint 2010

April 25th 2012 – International SharePoint Conference London 2012

Delivering a Search-Driven User Experience with SharePoint and FAST
Do you always know exactly what you are looking for? The traditional Search Engine model requires known and accurate keywords to return meaningful content. This session will cover best use of FAST technology including pipeline extensibility, lemmatisation, fuzzy logic and synonyms which can be combined with SharePoint to break that model and provide a compelling Search-Driven User Experience. An in-depth case study with lessons learned will also be presented including a live demo, in which everything ever recorded by the Government numbering tens of thousands of documents in a variety of unstructured, difficult and lengthy formats is successfully parsed and indexed to deliver a public-facing SharePoint site driven by FAST Search for a great User Experience.

Previous Talks

November 12th 2011 – SharePoint Saturday UK

SharePoint Intranet Branding
Web Content Management and the branding of public-facing SharePoint 2010 Publishing sites are relatively well-publicised and documented. However the majority of SharePoint deployments are internal-facing and typically require a greater degree of flexibility for users to remain unconstrained by fixed designs yet maintain the corporate identity.
This session will cover some Out Of The Box styling tips using CSS and dive into using Control Adapters for re-styling core SharePoint components and better target them using CSS and jQuery. Rounded corners included!

June 23rd 2011 - Polycom’s EMEA Executive Briefing Centre

Perfecting Collaborative Working
By embracing the latest business tools you can quickly change from a reflective to a reactive organisation; communicate as it happens, collaborate in real-time and build a dynamic business operation using Microsoft’s integrated technology suite, centred on using Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Lync and Microsoft Office.

April 12th 2011 – SharePoint Best Practices Conference UK

Taking SharePoint Offline
Many clients need the facility to work offline on occasion, especially those with a mobile sales team, or those being upgraded to SharePoint from a Lotus Notes environment used to offline replication. The content that sales people need access to can be rich and bandwidth-intensive, which makes a good 3G signal or poor Wi-Fi connection frustrating for the salesperson to use, not to mention the client. This session will cover the pros and cons of the options available for offline SharePoint, and why/how to build a Silverlight 4 out-of-browser application driven by SharePoint 2010, solving connectivity issues and taking advantage of SPMetal, LINQ, WCF, Isolated Storage and Silverlight.

February 24th 2011 – Microsoft Scotland

Dynamic Business 2011
As Gartner predicted for 2011, businesses must adopt new technologies to recover from the economic downturn. Understand the ‘New World of Business’, the strength of integrated technology solutions and be part of a live demonstration of Lync, SharePoint and Office working in unity

February 2nd 2011 – Edinburgh Napier University Conference

A Career in Software Engineering
Guidance to final year Software Engineering students on the Microsoft Ecosystem and how to transition from being in education to a career as a professional software developer.

November 26th 2010 – Microsoft Scotland

SharePoint in Education
An overview of SharePoint 2010 to Scottish Further Education Colleges and how it can be integrated with Lync and Line of Business applications to enable better communication between students, teachers and administration.