The 4th annual SharePoint Saturday Johannesburg took place yesterday. Business Connexion totally saved the day again by offering their venue when we were in a bind for one.  This is the 2nd event held at their offices, which is ideal for this size event.

I have to thank you to Alistair Pugin, Sarah Vernon, Athena Downs, Jozua Joubert and Bramley Maetsa for their tireless efforts in getting this event arranged with me.  It takes a village as you can imagine and there is a lot to do and organise.  It takes months of work to pull these events off and I could not have done it without them this year.

We had 20 speakers in 5 tracks.  Our international speaker this year was Fabian Williams, all the way from Maryland!  Looks like he had a good time!  Thanks for coming all the way down here, we know it’s a long way.  Our local speakers were Alistair Pugin, Lizl Snyman, Vanessa Raath, Karen Pheifferm Andrew-Thornton Smith, Tracy vd Schyff, Craig Tarr, Brian Murdoch, Dinah Coetzer, Jozua Joubert, Mohamed Essop, Marie Wessels, Marlon Green, Bryan Kimmel, Bradley Geldenhuys, Bramley Maetsa, Johan Myburgh, Chantelle Smith, Carmen Nel and Nick Bradshaw.  Thanks for sharing your time and skills with our event – many have spoken at all our events, and we loved having the new speakers on board too!

Our top speaker of the day as rated by the delegates was Johan Myburgh for his session on automatic document generation using out of box SharePoint.

All the usual festivities took place and you can see all the photos from the event on the Facebook page – go and tag yourselves if you attended.  Mint also took a ton of fun pics.

Of course our sponsors are ever so necessary or we couldn’t have this event at all. In addition to BCX, we also give a big shout out to GTconsult, Mint, Complexus, 3Fifteen, NetCampus, Kaizen IT, Microsoft and Ubuntu Technologies. The 3Fifteen smoothie bar and Mint ice-cream stands were a hit for sure!

As you know, Lets Collaborate has been coordinating SharePoint Saturday Joburg for the past 4 years.  While it has been an absolute honour and privilege to do so, we are stepping down as organisers for the event.  We feel it’s time for someone else to take the reins and take the event to the next level.  We will of course still be attending; sponsoring events where possible and running the business user group, but we just won’t be arranging this event again.  Luckily a few people have already offered to take over, so never fear, it shall continue.

And finally, well done to Amanda Coetzee for being the luckiest person in SPS history – her name was pulled 4 times in a row during the prize giving!  We’ve never seen anything like it. 🙂 Hope she bought a lottery ticket today. 🙂