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I recently moved my blog over to michaelwparks.com. Hope to see you there :)

Atlanta Web Designers Group July meetup

Thursday evening I attended my first meetup of the Atlanta Web Designers held at the Portfolio Center on Bennett Street. The meetup was well attended with approximately 50 members. The main speaker was Brandon Eley who presented some great tips on incorporating marketing into the design process for your website. I picked up several valuable techniques that I will definitely use. For example the number one question to ask when building a Website is "What do you want your visitors to do?" Make sure it's clear on each landing page exactly what action you most want a visitor to take. Make it stand out. Brandon mentioned that often sites are designed around the company organization chart. But it is far more effective to design with verbs and adverbs that guide visitors to take whatever action you want them to take...like "Buy Something" or "Download a demo".

Volunteers were requested to submit a website for critque by Brandon and the group. I volunteered a website I've been supporting and in return received some valuable feedback (and a copy of Brandon's new book). I'm looking forward to the August meetup of AWDG.

Mobile Camp Atlanta at King Plow

Saturday, July 18th I attended Mobile Camp Atlanta 2009, an barcamp-style event held at the King Plow Center on Marietta Street. The topic of this unconference was development of applications for mobile platforms with most sessions focused on iphone. The King Plow center, a renovated plow factory (1902-1986) is a fantastic venue to host an event. Sponsors including Georgia Tech Research Institute provided a great breakfast spread with the best selection of fruit I've ever seen at any event. I appreciated the unconference hours, 8:30am until 12:30pm, so it was a good way to start off the weekend without taking up too much of the weekend. Perfect timing.

Web Entrepreneurs - The Next Wave

The July meetup of Atl Web Entrepreneurs was quite an event with around 110 attendees stuffed into the Hodges room in the Centergy Building at Tech Square. With so many warm bodies the Hodges room heated up to uncomfortable levels...which is another story in itself. The subject of the meetup was How Google Wave Changes Everything (or not)." In spite of the large crowd I managed to snag a great seat in the back next to a wall plug for my power cord. I spent my time divided between listening to presentations and following #awe posts on twitter. We saw a short demo of Wave, several presentations, and heard lively discussion about what wave is and isn't which I believe is yet to be determined. An unforgettable moment occurred half way through the meeting when @stephenfleming the new Vice Provost of Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute showed up in shorts and t-shirt with fans from his garage to help cool down the room. Overall was a great meeting and I'm looking forward to the August meetup. July will be hard to beat.

Southern Fried Roadshow

Today I attended the June 2009 Southern Fried Roadshow at Microsoft Southeast Division Offices in Alpharetta, GA. This 1/2 day event (1-5pm) covered highlights from MIX, Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8, Silverlight 3 and Windows Azure. I really wanted to see the Azure material but alas I couldn't make it through the prelims. Like most good productions they saved the sexy information (Azure) until the last part of the day. I was sitting there listening to a presentation on programming power settings in Windows 7...and decided to call it a day. I felt a little guilty getting up to leave early but when I turned around the guy sitting behind me was sound asleep :) Sure wish I could have heard the 411 on Azure...oh well. One day I'm sure Microsoft will catch up with Starbucks, Curry Honda customer service waiting room, and the store where I always buy tires (Midtown Tire on Ponce)...and provide WiFi to visitors!!!!!  With a little WiFi I would have easily waited until the Azure presentation started...but sitting there without access to the Internet is truely unbearable...sorry I'm just being honest. 

Sharepoint Saturday was a hit

On Saturday I attended a great event, Sharepoint Saturday, at Microsoft's offices located in Alpharetta, Ga. The weather was perfect yet the event was packed which I think says something positive about the growing popularity of Sharepoint. The event was free of charge with a number of sponsors paying the costs and top notch speakers many of whom flew or drove from out of town on their own dime to present sessions. There were so many great sessions going on simultaneously I had a difficult time choosing which to attend. The first one I attended had a long title, "Building the next Generation of Sharepoint Web Parts - how to leverage JQuery and Silverlight" presented by Phil Wicklund. Phil gave an easy to understand overview of JQuery along with some great tips for getting started...and demonstrated how to easily include JQuery in sharepoint web parts. Phil stressed checking out existing plugins first at http://plugins.jquery.com before writing anything from scratch in JQuery....good tip.  

I actually didn't stay for the 2nd half of Phil's presentation on Silverlight instead I moved over to Dux Raymond's talk on "5 Ways to Enhance Sharepoing Site Usability" where I caught 3 out of the 5 ways.  Sorry I didn't write them down I'm waiting on the slide deck. 

For the next set of sessions I split my time between Jason Storey "Building a Data Centric Portal in Sharepoint" where Jason demonstrated using the data view web part in Sharepoint Designer and "Integrating SQL Server 2005  Reporting Services with Sharepoint" where Chris Regan walked us through step by step the ardious task of installing and configuring reporting services and sharepoint to work together. Interesting that the reporting services configuration wizard sometimes "lies" to you and other times simply doesn't work without manual intervention...whew...it's going to be much tougher than I thought getting reporting services working with my sharepoint server but at least now I know. 

A nice deli box lunch was provided by one of the sponsors and I made the mistake of finding a shady spot in the beautiful outdoors to enjoy it. Which started me thinking what a great day it is and how much I would like to attend the Atlanta Dogwood Festival. I resolve to attend one more session before heading home and to the festival. 

For my last session I picked "Business Intelligence - Build a Dashboard with Excel Services and KPIs" by Jeremy Minich. In the past I've built a BI dashboard in Sharepoint without really understanding all of the steps and have struggled getting a couple of things to work so I thought I would benefit from seeing an expert walk through the process. And I was correct as Jeremy did an outstanding job explaining the various BI features in Sharepoint and demonstrated how to setup dashboards and KPI's step by step exactly what I needed to see. 

I missed a couple of sessions and the give-a-ways at the end of the day by leaving early but I still had a great time at Sharepoint Saturday and accomplished what I needed...a new burst of sharepoint inspiration as well as specific "how to" knowledge of new technologies and techniques.

Thanks to Microsoft and all the other sponsors,  speakers,  and volunteer's who made Sharepoint Saturday a success. I'm looking forward to the next one....and hoping for bad weather on event day.   

 

 

 

2009 Atlanta CodeCamp

The fifth Atlanta Codecamp was held at Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, GA on March 14th. Codecamp is always held on a Saturday and lasts all day....8am until 6pm. This year the weather in Atlanta cooperated...cold and rainy...so it wasn't too hard giving up my Saturday to attend. Highlights for me included the Doug Ware session about running Sharepoint server on Amazon Web Services, and other sessions on Intro to Azure, alternate membership providers for Sharepoint, and ASP.NET 4.0 Ajax. Even with the bad economy there was a pile of swag to give away at the end of the day. I was lucky enough to win a 5 lb book on Sharepoint 2007 development. Codecamp is a wonderful event attended by passionate coders who can't think of anything better than spending all day Saturday soaking up new knowledge and making new tech friends. Looking forward to next year.