As regular readers have probably gathered, my primary role when attending SharePoint conferences is providing coverage of sessions by documenting and sharing that information with Bamboo Nation. One rather unfortunate side-effect of such a responsibility is that I'm rarely able to spend time in our booth meeting customers and/or fielding questions from attendees who may be unfamiliar with Bamboo. So it was with no small amount of glee that I responded "no problem!" to a text message from a colleague summoning me to help out at the booth for a couple of hours earlier today.
Bamboo is spotlighting our Partners during the SPC, with representatives from a dozen Partners appearing in the booth daily, spending time meeting with our customers and discussing their own company offerings. I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Adrian Ducille of Knowledge Management Associates, Inc., who was appearing in the booth during the time that I worked my shift:
Near the end of my time spent in the booth, Pat Esposito and Kevin Roskot were on the scene to represent Impact Management. Both the company name and Pat Esposito's should be immediately familiar to Bamboo Nation readers who saw Steve's post this morning, Bamboo + Impact Management = SharePoint Miracles.
We saw a steady stream of visitors while I was helping staff the booth, and I was able to meet and speak with a many folks, some of whom were existing customers with specific questions about current and upcoming products, and others of whom were new to Bamboo and wanted to know about our offerings. Since my coverage of conference sessions has me well trained in the art of note-taking, I was able to hastily scribble notes in the (few) lulls, so it's my pleasure to share some of the questions (and their answers) that came up while I was pulling my shift in booth #315:
- Will your Web Parts work in SharePoint Online? Currently, SharePoint Online is available in a "dedicated server" model or a "multi-tenant" model. Third-party code such as Bamboo Web Parts currently runs in the dedicated model, but is not supported in the multi-tenant model at present. We are working closely with Microsoft in this area and expect changes in 2010.
- Would you be interested in partnering with a company to provide foreign language translations of our products? Yes, absolutely. Currently, we work with our Partner amexus in Germany who provide German language translations of our products, and who recently joined us to begin offering German language webinars on Bamboo products. Please contact Wes Bryan, who heads up our Product Management team if you're interested in partnering with us to provide foreign language translastions of Bamboo products.
- When is your partner session at the SPC? Our session on The Future of SharePoint Project Management takes place this afternoon from 4:30-6 in South Pacific C.
- Do you do hosting? No, but in December we will begin offering hosted solutions, with our Requirements Management Central application as the first offering.
- What's new with Bamboo? In addition to the aforementioned offering of hosted solutions, we'll be releasing the Beta version of Conductor, Bamboo's workflow product, as a free download in Bamboo Labs within the next 30 days.
- I was hoping you'd have a disk with some free products... We have our stylish "evolution" t-shirts available at the booth as giveaways, but are you familiar with Bamboo Labs? As part of Bamboo Nation, our community site, Labs serves as our incubator for new products, and we currently have 8 products available as free Beta downloads.
- Do the Beta versions of your offerings in Bamboo Labs expire? Once a product has "graduated" from Labs to the storefront, we end the Beta in Labs, but if you had downloaded a Beta copy while it was available, that early version will continue to run.
These were just a few of the questions that came up during my couple of hours spent in the booth, but I hope they helped provide a glimpse into the SPC excitement. My next appearance will be over in our SharePoint 2010 blog, where we've been publishing all of the coverage of SPC sessions. Next on the agenda is our own session on The Future of SharePoint Project Management!
Posted
Oct 20 2009, 07:12 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.