This post was most recently updated on March 25th, 2023.
3 min read.Whoops – this post comes quite late, as the session was a couple of weeks ago already. I recently had a session at SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities (SPS TC for short) and thought I’d share my materials and document my experiences. Oh, and do the shout-outs, since I referenced some materials and tools by some extremely talented people!
Don’t want to crawl through the jabbering? Just the materials are here. Thanks for your interest, and you’re welcome!
What was SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities like this year?
The community around Minneapolis & St. Paul is great. It’s constantly one of the bigger SPS events in North America, and the conversations with the attendees are great. This year, the weather conditions were quite adverse, as the Twin Cities area experienced the “Blizzard of a Lifetime”, and weather warnings that forbid travelling. Even then, some 200 hardy Minnesotans drove through the snowstorm to participate in the sessions. Driving conditions were not easy, and I should know – we experience the same weather and similar storms in Finland, but we are allowed to use studded tires… :)
Adverse weather conditions are nothing new, though. Last year in SPTechCon Austin, a tornado hit the city a day before the event – and that was a first for me! I recall Chicago had flood warnings before SPS Chicago Suburbs – although I guess that’s not that extraordinary.
Anyway, I was in SPS TC with Tiina from Valo, we flew in on Thursday, got to see the city a bit and met some friends and associates on Friday, before the SPS on Saturday. SPS TC itself was great, as always. A lot of active community members braved the weather and came to the sessions to chat with the vendors.
Flying in a blizzard is apparently not easy
The way back was way more challenging – since it kept snowing for the whole Saturday and most of Sunday, a lot of roads were in untraversable condition, and there were a ton of cars stuck in the snow – even on the highways! On Sunday, our flight (like hundreds of others) was also cancelled, which stranded us in Minneapolis. Luckily, we were able to reschedule a flight for later that night.
Montreal had suffered a smaller blizzard in the meantime, mainly consisting of icy hail. That meant that when we came back, everything was covered in a 5mm (1/5 inch) thick layer of ice. The next morning, my dog was struggling to stay upright, so I’ve got no idea how the plane landed and actually didn’t just slip over the end of the runway.
All in all, interesting and cool trip, despite turning out to be a bit more complicated than it was supposed to be.
Materials
This section contains all of the materials I produced for/during the event.
Slides
Okay, long story short, I uploaded my slides to SlideShare, and you can find them here:
Pictures
I also uploaded a couple of photos of the event (especially the weather!) on Twitter, if you want to see what the weather was like!
https://twitter.com/search?q=koskila%20spstc&src=typd
Demo Videos
Demo 1: Resolving Managed Metadata Madness in SharePoint
Demo 2: Mirroring content between Classic SharePoint sites
Demo 3: Push notification via Flow
Shout-outs:
I’m using Tomi Tavela’s awesome SP Chrome Editor to add the webhook in demo 3. Check it out!
I got the idea for the second demo from my chats with Henrik Blåfield and Juha Koivula at Valo, and the awesome folks at Hirschtec.
Vlad Catrinescu from Absolute-SharePoint gave me a lot of actionable feedback on my slides – thanks!
In my Azure Functions, I’m using OfficeDev PnP, which makes development a lot more straightforward. If you’re not using the library, you should check it out.
And last, but not least – thank you to the SPS TC organizers for having me! It was a blast :)
He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.
This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.
