No Marketing.
Attendees are coming to take technical classes — they don’t want to hear a sales pitch, no matter how thickly veiled. Please do not submit classes that are geared around persuading attendees to buy your product or use your service. SPTechCon classes are for teaching, not for marketing.
One Instructor.
Our experience shows that a class taught by more than one instructor is generally not as satisfying as a class taught by a single instructor. If you are proposing multiple instructors, be sure to explain why — and the role that each instructor plays in the class.
Be Prepared.
Teaching at SPTechCon means more than just showing up at the conference. Please pay attention to the deadlines for submission of handouts and other materials. These deadlines help us ensure that the conference provides a quality educational experience for all attendees, and your cooperation is appreciated.
No Parachutes.
Please stick around for most or all of the conference, to interact with attendees and other speakers. We expect our instructors to partake of the entire SPTechCon experience. We're not looking for instructors to parachute in for a class, teach, and then disappear.
SPTechCon is for SharePoint administrators, architects and developers, and line-of-business professionals who customize, deploy, maintain and maximize business value from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Services.
The first day at SPTechCon is filled with deep-dive tutorial full (6-hour) and half-day (3-hour) workshops. The next two days contain dozens of 75-minute classes running concurrently in six time slots.
When you propose a workshop or a class, be clear about the audience. Is your class for business managers and analysts? Administrators? Developers? Think about who would be most interested in your topic, and your presentation of that topic. Also, be sure to explain what skill students will take away from your class. Be definite! Also tell us if your session is introductory, intermediate or for experts.
SPTechCon welcomes sessions built around real-world SharePoint case studies.
Acceptance of your class proposal will be based not only on your topic’s timeliness and relevance, but also on your own credentials as a SharePoint expert and experience as an instructor. Be sure to communicate how clearly you can state what your class will be about, who would benefit from taking it, any prerequisite knowledge, and what the student will learn. A muddled, confused submission is likely to get rejected.
The ideal instructor is someone with expert credentials in SharePoint and other relevant technologies, and who has proven experience teaching practical solutions to real-world challenges, presenting new skills, and offering students an information-packed learning experience.
Sample Topics
Here are a few of the types of sessions that we are looking for at SPTechCon. If you have an idea and it’s not on the list, that’s great. We welcome your ideas, creativity, experience and expertise.
- Seek and Ye Shall Find: Delivering Content That Users Need
- Designing Reusable SharePoint Features for Line-of-Business Application Development
- Data Movement, Storage, Archiving and Recovery
- Dazzling SharePoint With Silverlight
- Social Networking and User Profiles for Business
- Building Business Intelligence Portals
- SharePoint Planning and Governance
- Fast Track to SharePoint Feature Generation
- SharePoint: The Ultimate Information Management Library
- Collaborating Outside Your Organization with SharePoint
- SharePoint With Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008
- Best Practices: Doing It Right the First Time
Event Schedule
Monday, June 22, 2009: Workshops
Tuesday, June 23, 2009: Technical Classes
Wednesday, June 24, 2009: Technical Classes
Speaker Deadlines
Friday, February 6, 2009: Abstract submissions, including all information described below.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009: Speaker notification of acceptance.
Preparation of Submission
Please include the following information in your speaker proposal:
- Title of class or workshop
- Abstract or submission, 150–200 words, describing the class and what attendees will learn from it
- Any prerequisites of the proposed class, such as technical proficiency or knowledge-level of a topic
- Any prerequisites such as a laptop and any pre-loaded software
- Speaker bio, 125–150 words
- Speaker name(s), mailing and e-mail addresses, telephone and cell phone numbers
- Hi-res digital headshot of speaker
Please submit your information electronically as a text e-mail or as a Word document to David Rubinstein, Conference Chairman, DRubinstein@bzmedia.com. Please note that we will edit class titles, descriptions and bios to fit our style, and also to ensure that the description clearly presents information about your session to attendees.
Contacts
Questions about the speaker submission process:
David Rubinstein, Conference Chairman
+1-631-421-4158 x105 or drubinstein@bzmedia.com
Kathy Bruin, Conference Manager
+1-415-642-6108 or kbruin@bzmedia.com
General questions about SPTechCon:
Ted Bahr, Director of Events
+1-631-421-4158 x101 or ted@bzmedia.com