As most of you know, I was a speaker at the Indianapolis SharePoint Saturday event. We had close to a capacity crowd, with over 250 attendees. Not bad for a little town in the Midwest. OK, Indianapolis isn't all that small. There are a few events that draw more people - like the Indianapolis 500. And I hear there's also a football team... (just kidding - Go Colts!).

My Session

Nevertheless, there were 20 sessions, in four tracks. My session was the first of the day in the "No-code solutions" track. I gave an Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010 (click the link to download a PDF of the presentation). I touched on many of the key features, but gave special emphasis to how you could easily configure SharePoint to disable the "dangerous" functions (modifying master pages, and editing or un-ghosting pages). This, along with SPD's new emphasis on business process integration, makes it a great tool to give to your business analysts and information workers, without needing to worry about them "messing up" your corporate branding or making their sites unusable.

Collaboration and Camaraderie

Of course, the big benefit of coming to a smaller conference is getting actual face-to-face time with the presenters, without the pressure of competing with thousands of others who want the same thing.

And let's not forget drawing for door prizes!

In the end, knowledge was shared, connections were formed, and a good time was had by all.

I'm really looking forward to the next one!

P.S. In case you missed it earlier, here is a link to a PDF of my presentation.