Yesterday afternoon Hal Hayes and I were invited to speak at the SharePoint Technology Conference hosted and organized by the SharePoint User Group DC (SUGDC). The following is some information about the event:

For two exciting days, you'll be eating, drinking,  talking and living Microsoft Office SharePoint  with Microsoft's Most Valued Professionals (MVP's) from across the country. There are tracks for developers, users, managers, and administrators. There will be time to network with some of the areas top employers where you will discover just how much demand there is for people with SharePoint skills. Learn the best practices for implementing SharePoint and how to customize it to meet your specific needs. Whether you are a beginner looking to advance your career, or an experienced professional that wants to get deeper knowledge, this is the place to do it. June 26 & 27 (Friday and Saturday).

Indeed the event was packed with sessions hosted by leaders and top professionals in the Microsoft SharePoint space. I was quite honored to be invited to speak, and if that wasn’t enough, I was speaking more on behalf of DotNetNuke rather than SharePoint.

As the title of this blog post implies, the session was all about comparing SharePoint VS DotNetNuke and although I did not imagine it would be the case, I found it extremely hard not to be impartial and lean towards praising DotNetNuke over SharePoint, but hey, I tried!. As many of you know I am deeply rooted and involved in the project. My business also largely focuses on providing professional services for the DotNetNuke Application Framework, as well as being and ISV of products that run on the DotNetNuke platform!

To my dismay, given that this was a SharePoint focused event, attendance of the session was decent. I did not take a head count, but by the looks of it I think that we had roughly 20 to 25 professionals willing to listen. Needless to say, most of the attendees were die-hard SharePointers.

I have to admit, initially I was a little intimidated by the response I *thought* we would get from the audience, but was later pleasantly surprised by their willingness to listen to what DotNetNuke provides that SharePoint does not, and vice versa. I mentioned that most of my views on the platforms came from real life experiences I have had with both platforms; My company has implemented very large enterprise implementations of SharePoint (up to 400,000 site collections) as well as DotNetNuke, and my views were a direct reflection of that experience.
I think most of the folks present found the session valuable and useful to what they do on a daily basis, and they will be able to use this information to make more informative decisions when it comes to suggesting an alternative to SharePoint; that was, after all, the intent of the session to begin with.

I’ll be honest with you, I was anticipating a bunch of booos, pies in our faces, and rotten tomatoes, but the audience was great! With had a few civilized back and forth's, but overall they were gracious enough to host us and some, I am sure, left with a positive and open view about implementing DotNetNuke when the time and place is right.

The highlight of the session though, was towards the end, when we played the video below. Hal Hayes was brave enough to re-enact the “Sham Wow” commercial repurposed for DotNetNuke.

A big shout-out goes to Affinigent for producing the video for us, just as they do with our monthly Capital DotNetNuke User Group (CUDG) sessions. I am sure you will enjoyed it as much as we did!