Lightning Tools along with our strategic consulting partner ID-Live hosted SharePoint Saturday in the UK for the fourth year running with great success on the 9th November 2013. As always, the lead up to the event took a lot of organizing and led to sleepless nights with concern that ‘nobody would show up!’. Fortunately they did show up! We had around 340 registrations and 250 attendees, 40 speakers, and 18 exhibitors.
Tony Pounder, Andy Smith, Mark Macrae and myself were the key organizers of the event but couldn’t have achieved the day without the help of other members of the community also.
Lightning Tools also announced their partnership with Collabion in order to offer the SharePoint Chart Web Part at SharePoint Saturday UK. The Chart web part provides users of any SharePoint on-premises version with an easy way to configure charts for Business Connectivity Services data, SharePoint lists, Excel workbooks, Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases.
For the first year, as well as organizing an event that is free to attend, we decided to raise money for charity. The infamous SharePoint author Penny Coventry MVP came up with the great idea of selling used SharePoint books. I suspected that the odd speaker may show up with a few books. I raided my book shelf of around 10 books. However, we had literally hundreds of books to sell and raised £750 for Children in Need!
In the US especially, there are many SharePoint Saturday events held almost every week. If you haven’t attended one before, I can highly recommend it for free exposure to some of the best SharePoint speakers within your region.
Visit www.spsevents.org for more information!
Brett Lonsdale
