Hi,
Just wondering about the two conferences in 2014 and whether the European Conference in Barcelona will be as good as the Microsoft Conference in Vegas? And what the main differences will be?
It will be my first time attending either Conference.
Many thanks
Mark.
I don’t know about Vegas to tell you the truth but I was Speaker in the European SharePoint Conference this year in Denmark.. talking about training and sessions and labs all that is a matter of; “oh I know this session” or “nothing new for me here” .. but I am not going to say bad session because I think 95% they were great sessions with value.. but how much do you know to be interested while attending any session…
Brilliant summary and very helpful. Many thanks for this.
I love Barcelona as a city so that appeals to me very much. Although looking at the costs there is not much in between Barca and Vegas; as I have found the hotels to be more expensive in Barcelona.
It will be my first experience of attending the conferences so whichever I attend should be interesting for me.
Hope you get a speaking slot at the Barcelona conference. If you do, let me know and I will put it on my list.
Thanks
Mark.
SPC in Vegas is huge (last year 10k participants) and fun (many parties around).
Speaker wise it usually also has many unknown MS speakers with not so much speaking experience (and often repeating boring topics)Â
The sessions of the celebrity speakers are usually way too full, so you actually have to leave the session before earlier to be sure to get into the next one… no comment on that.
At least you can watch all the sessions right the week after the conference online.
Also SPC has a long year reputation that they don’t manage to get WiFi running 😉
SharePoint Evolutions in London (or ISC as it was previously called) is IMO the best conference so far content-wise.
Always very good speakers and content. Last year they had a whole storyline throughout two tracks for 3 days in a row, which meant bascially the ITPros build a farm based on requirements, which the dev track used for their solution they were building over the days. Great fun and a little different to the other conferences with the sessions which don’t have anything to do with each other.
Though I heard this year they didn’t do it that way anyore.
ESPC is ranked 3rd place in all the conferences I attended (and I attended many, both as participant and speaker). I like that it is going around different cities, many good sessions, but also many mediocre ones.
The speakers at ESPC are often more from Europe than the US (hence the European in the name 😉 )
Let’s see, maybe I have luck and get a speaking slot there too next year 😀
Anyway, in my opinion all of them are worth going there! 🙂
So it most likely it depends on the timing (SPC March, SPEvo April, ESPC May) the costs and of course your expectations!
That is a very valid point. The cost of the airfare is expensive for Vegas.
My other consideration is whether I spend the money on training and certification instead of Barcelona or Las Vegas?
The only reason why I would not go to Vegas is that it will be more expensive at least for the flight ticket, I am in the Middle East [UAE – Dubai] but I am Egyptian 🙂
