I was the first one who registered for SharePoint Conference 2008 Seattle, it was very important for me to join this conference, but I applied for visa by late, 20 days before the conference! I didn't know anything about those appointment things for US consulate at Dubai, it was an online appointment system on the consulate's site, and you will never be able to get an appointment from that system! After a while I realized that there is some human related systems and you can get appointments by some kind of tips and tricks, this is Middle East! Anyway I lost that conference, and those registration guys refunded all my payments back, even when I exceed cancelation policies, especial thanks to Microsoft Dynamic Events Team, and hope for a peace world without any visa requirements.
Then I used my chance to join for the SharePoint Conference 2008 Dubai, it was really amazing for me to see those peoples I always talked them through emails and blogs, I will write about sessions that I enjoyed.
Amr El Garhy, an unbelievable presenter, full of energy, and excellent for presenting new ideas, I really enjoyed his sessions. He talked about new features of InfoPath and how to use it for office automation. We loosed his session about how to use Silver light and AJAX by SharePoint, Amr has some kind of urgent, and he came directly from the hospital for a session about SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services and how to integrate with SharePoint 2007. He was really great even on situations like that! Wish health and happiness for Amr and his family.
Patrick Beeharry, SharePoint Server Products and Solutions marketing manager, Microsoft Middle East and Africa, one who did lots efforts to setup this event, I was lucky to see him at conference's dinner, and discussing about those subjects that was very important for me. He announced about Microsoft Search Server 2008, so I realized that we don't need to buy MOSS 2007 anymore, if you need advance search features for an small to mid range deployments, WSS 3.0 + MSS 2008 Express Edition is your answer. Social Computing in the Enterprise was the name of his second session that I had no chance to participate.
Joel Oleson , he was at the highest technical level in the conference, the first topic I was really interested to participate, was SharePoint Governance and Adoption, I had a bad cold, and couldn't go for that, so I asked my colleague Mrs. Firouz to participate, and she promised me to write a blog post about that on her blog. He has also two sessions about Administration fundamental and Advance Administration.
Alireza Aliabadi, it was very interesting to see an Iranian Microsoft MVP as one of speakers! He was pure technical, excellent and fun on presentations. He has 3 sessions about BI, Excel Services, Web Services and a new creative idea about how to implement a server side office automation system using new technologies of XML support on Microsoft Word ( WordML ).
Sabah Corn, Business group lead and information worker at Microsoft Gulf, she was at keynote and closing session, just want to say her congratulations! And thanks for your great job.
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farvashan