Tomorrow begins the sold out ITForum Europe! You could say it began today with registration. ITForum is right next door. I'm here at the Hilton Diagonal Mar across the street from Diagonal Mar shopping area looking out my window at the Med sea and the beach. You could really call it the Spanish Riviera The weather isn't too cold, it's been in the high 60's maybe even low 70's during the days cooling off nicely at night. I arrived on Saturday with a stop over in CDG (Charles de Gaulle) airport. I didn't think we were going to make our connection, but our flight was delayed leaving by an hour and we had plenty of time.
I look forward to IT Forum all year. This is my fourth year and it really only gets better each year. Barcelona, Spain is an awesome venue. The weather is great this time of year, and Las Ramblas is always rocking.
I've been hanging out with Fabio an IIS Dev and Faith an IIS PM. They are both speaking on IIS 7. I've been giving them jokes for their presentations, so watch out :) Saturday morning after checking in, we jumped on the light rail and went to Plaza de Espanya a great square then went up the steps of the national art museum at Montjuic. Had a pannini and fanta orange for a snack. There was a guy playing his 12? string guitar outside the museum playing some nice relaxing spanish folk music.
After the museum we dedided to drop by Las Ramblas and check out the venue for the SharePoint speaker party, and get some tapas. The food was fresh at the Mercat de Boqueria the fruit and chocolate and various mismash of flavors filled the air. After checking out the different cuts of meat like the rabbit and sheep with no skin. We dropped by a nearby resteraunt for Tapas. We ended up upstairs so we couldn't see what the options were. We ended up with a mix, that worked out pretty well... very heavy on the sausage and meatball, but the dishes were all pretty good. We walked the length of La Rambas enjoying every minute of it. The mimes were out in full color. The cowboy, the gold Thai guy, the girl in tights that kisses the kids that give her coins, and a guy in a box. There was a guy at the end of the street near the statue of Columbus that was juggling with a huge crowd. He was tossing 2 of those spinning cylinder things taller than the buildings. We also enjoyed the people selling chickens, ferrets, parakeets, and turtles.
The Flamenco dance place doesn't take Amex or Visa directly, so he asked me to pay over the web. Sad. Looks like I'm going to have to pay with my own card or figure out a way to do it through the hotel.
Today we decided to meet up for breakfast downstairs on the first floor and I went to church at the Barcelona ward on Monsterrat. One of the elders translated for me. I then followed a family to the metro on my way to Segura Familia to meet back up with Faith and Fabio. My wallet was lost or stollen. Doh. I've been cancelling my cards and trying to get new ones. Yuck. That's been painful, but since Shane had asked me about money it reminded me to bring Travelers checks. So I'm covered minus the speaker party. Don't worry. :) I've got plenty of friends with cards.
At lunch we went to a nice little cafe and got pizza and calzones. Hey we're next to Italy, why not? We each shared and had a great meal.
Segura Familia has had a bunch more work done on it. Since 1882 and still going... with a lot still left to go. It's an amazing place. The hike up the hill from the metro stop, although daunting is totally, totally worth it. You might want to take a taxi for this one if your not a hiker, cause there is more walking in the park to get to the cool stuff. We went up the elevator, then went across to a few of the different towers and got some great shots. Then went on to Parc Guell, the cross on top, the aqueduct, the bench, the lizard, some of the best views of the city. Best photo shots I'd say. Great place I recommend these two places as THE places to go every time you visit Barcelona. Third would be La Ramblas a great street that really brings out the life. Two of the three are free, so you can't beat that. The Segura familia is best taken with some time so you can go up top, you can climb up from the back side up the nativity side of the building, the opposite side that you enter in. Also don't miss the museum in the basement, it's easy to miss, and includes all the history and inspiration for the building.
After the parc, we were hungry again and made our way back to Las Ramblas to another Tapas place. Spanish food baby. Awesome stuff. We ate at the bar, recommended for newbies. It allowed us to pick and choose the tapas and montes. For about 1,50 Euro you could have great hand sized meat and bread things or a small bowl of mushrooms, meatballs, sausages, northern spanish blood sausages, or various fish dishes like salmon, cuddlefish and octopus.
Tomorrow I'm doing a chalk talk with long time SharePoint Ranger, Kimmo Forss on Global deployment. We've both done a lot of work in this area. Kimmo is also track owner. He's a very smart Finn.
I'm meeting up with Shane and Nicola Young tomorrow morning after they fly in. Nicola's going to be managing the SharePoint booth with me. We should have quite the crowd. 5000+ attendees and you know SharePoint's been hot, so we are bound to get a lot of traffic. We should be ready. We've got some new "I got the Point!" stickers, some DVDs, deployment checklists, maybe more.
Hoping to meet up with some management product vendors for SharePoint to get some demos lined up so I can share the info. Also looking for SharePoint security management related products. Hoping to meet up with the Idevfactory.com folks. I'm sure I'll see K2, AvePoint, and Quest, but guess who I saw today??? Brian Cook from OBS (he presented an awesome talk on adoption at the SharePoint preconf in Sydney and got one of the highest if not the highest score there). I've borrowed a couple of his slides for my governance talk on Tuesday. Ran into him at the top of the hill at Parc Guell, the one with the world's longest bench (the one you have to skate in Tony Hawk 2) and the colorful lizard they call draco (dragon?).
More on the conference tomorrow if it's not after 1am or if I can fit it in at a quick update at one of the kiosks. Stop by the booth and say hi! I hear that Kimmo Forss, Arpan Shah, Richard Riley have all arrived.
By the way, the SharePoint Infrastructure Governance session listed below will focus on the Solution Accelerator tools. It will show demos of all of the new tools coming out. The discovery tool, the capacity planner, the SCOM 2007 MOM packs, and the solution deployment samples. We are actively seeking beta customers for validating the SCOM 2007 WSS and MOSS Packs.
Here's my speaker session information. I'm sure to pop in on one or more of Shane's sessions as well.
Monday, 12 November 2007
16:00 - 17:15 OFF02-IS - Collaborating Across the Globe using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
Do you host sites and services for teams that coll...
Kimmo Forss, Joel Oleson
Room 133
17:45 - 19:00 OFF01-ILL - Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Advanced Administration
Learn about advanced options for the SharePoint ad...
Joel Oleson
Room 119
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
09:00 - 10:15 OFF01-IS - Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 in Windows Server 2008 is Hot!
If Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 in Window...
Joel Oleson
Room 132
10:45 - 12:00 OFF209 - SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Guidance
The most important thing you will do in any ShareP...
Joel Oleson, Luis Camara Manoel, Oleg Glubochansky
Room 111
15:15 - 16:30 OFF03-IS - Governing your SharePoint Infrastructure
Please join us in this interactive session where y...
Joel Oleson, Luis Camara Manoel, Oleg Glubochansky
Room 131
