Last Saturday I went to San Diego SharePoint Saturday 2018. It was held at CSU San Marcos. I had a good time and learned a lot. I inherited an older SharePoint site at work that I maintain as part of my Training Coordinator duties. I upload files and try to create interesting layouts that make the site easier to use. We have moved to SharePoint (2016) Online and I needed to design it and transfer all the content from the older site. I went to SharePoint Saturday to get some tips that might help me.
SharePoint Saturday was great from me. It gave me some ideas and exposed me to some issues about SharePoint. The first two sessions that I attended were about Communication Sites and how they are different than Team sites. Right now both our old and new SharePoint intranets are built on Team sites. Being exposed to Communication Sites and the future of Hub Sites to connect Team and Communication Sites gave me some background that I will use at work. Maybe I will move some of our content to Communication Sites? I will have to experiment with them but these seminars at least will get me started. What was nice about these sessions is that I got to see how experienced professionals view these tools. Hopefully this will help me make decisions going forward and this is the kind of value this sort of event provides. Normally this sort of advice is something you have to pay for. You have to take a chance with hiring a vendor and hoping things work out. Here, I was able to be educated a little bit before having to make some big decisions. Even if that decision is to bring in an outside vendor at least I have been exposed to what they are talking about before they are hired.
Oh, I forgot to mention that the event was FREE! They even fed us a free boxed lunch. Between hosting the venue, free admission for educational seminars and free food the sponsors of this event really provided a great educational event for the two to three hundred of us that attended. These events are organized (for free) across the world so if you want to go to one near you or go to multiple ones it is a great opportunity that really only requires your investment of your time on a Saturday. Check out the parent organization SPS Events at http://www.spsevents.org/ and maybe you will find some interesting tips like I did. The events are powered locally by volunteers. The San Diego group responsible for this event was SANSPUG (San Diego SharePoint User Group) that can be found on Meetup.com as https://www.meetup.com/sanspug. Please note that the SANSPUG group will be changing and calling themselves the SoCal Office 365 Productivity Group and future meetings will be posted here - https://www.meetup.com/socalo365/.
