There’s now less than week to go until the third annual SharePoint Connections Conference, which combines sessions that show you how to make SharePoint really deliver with the chance to have some fun in Amsterdam.

One of the attractions of the conference, being held November 22nd-23rd in the Dutch capital Amsterdam, is the mix of technical sessions looking at specific aspects of SharePoint use, to those where the speaker’s years of experience are condensed to help you become more aware of how to work with SharePoint.

An excellent example of the spread in sessions is the range of topics covered by Dan Holme, the keynote speaker. Dan is SharePoint Server MVP of the year, and in his keynote he will show how to use SharePoint policies, roles and processes to make your SharePoint systems work for your business users while making sure the governance and management side of the equation works equally well.

Dan follows up his keynote with “To BLOB or Not to BLOB? Storage Optimization Demystified” which takes a balanced view of when it makes sense to store your BLOBs externally from SharePoint and SQL Server, and when you should avoid it. The session looks at the performance impact, scalability implications, and critical considerations for backup and restore, high availability, and disaster recovery.

A third session by Dan, titled “I Wish I’d Have Known That Sooner! SharePoint Insanity Demystified” takes a wider look at what Dan has learned after years of helping organizations around the world to deploy and implement SharePoint. Dan says that there are certain pain points that almost everyone encounters. Some are confusing concepts. Some are bad decisions driven by Microsoft’s UI and documentation. Some are due to unnecessarily complex terminology. And some because there are things that SharePoint should do, but can’t. In this session, Dan will share the most common and problematic scenarios, and their solutions, with the goal of saving you pain, time, and money.

Another session where you can benefit from the real-world experience of the speaker is Mirjam van Olst’s “SharePoint 2010 Developer’s Mythbusters”. In her session Mirjam looks at how to avoid pitfalls caused by common misconceptions – the situation where ‘everyone’ tells you ‘this is how it works’, but when you try it you discover that ‘everyone’ is wrong. This session will point out gotchas, provide some best practices and also look more deeply into some of the IT Pro side aspects that you need to know about in order to be able to build solid SharePoint solutions.

Some topics in SharePoint are so vital that you can’t create a successful SharePoint application unless you have mastered them, and Search is one such area. Agnes Molnar’s session “Beyond the Search Center” looks at what users really need - the ability to find information. This means that as developers, you have to make sure your business users can actually find the document they want from the many thousands or even millions stored in a SharePoint system. Agnes will demonstrate tools and techniques for search customization, and demonstrate configuration and coding to tailor the way search works.

Some of the sessions are unashamedly for coders, such as Wouter van Vugt’s session on “Managing JavaScript in SharePoint“. He will show how to register scripts, how to work with the Script On Demand feature to improve page performance, and how to make use of features such as page components, the dialog and the notification areas. The session also covers JQuery integration.

If you haven't already booked your place be sure to use I-Programmer's exclusive discount code to save €100.

To Register for SharePoint Connections go to:

http://nccomms-events.com/sharepointconnections

and be sure to enter the offer code GAO7UYT

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Google+, Twitter or Facebook or sign up for our weekly newsletter.