After taking some time off from public speaking after the birth of my daughter in May, I’m back at it! I’ll be speaking at the three upcoming events in December:

SharePoint User Group Chicago
December 8, 2011 – 1 p.m. – 5 p.m.
​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Topic:How Do I Connect to That?
You might of heard of one or more of these terms before: Business Connectivity Services, ADO.NET, the Entity Framework, and LINQ. You might know that these can all be used in one way or another to connect SharePoint to external data sources. However, it can be confusing to know the various options available to you for getting information from an external data source into SharePoint and getting information written back to that data source. It can be even more difficult to know which connectivity model to choose given your particular SharePoint application. I will give an overview of how BCS, ADO.NET, and the ADO.NET Entity Franework can all be used independently or in combination with one another to connect your SharePoint environment to back end data sources.

SharePoint Saturday Kansas City
December 10, 2011
Topics: How Do I Connect to That? and
​​Managing Records in SharePoint – Step 1: Develop Retention Rules that Work
Your organization has decided to manage records and information in SharePoint. Your first step must be to develop an accurate file plan and retention rules. Without applying retention rules to SharePoint, you might be headed for trouble. This session will guide you through the process of developing a file plan with retention rules and implementing it in SharePoint. This session will also show you how you can use the SharePoint object model to write code that will create and update retention policies programmatically. I’ll be co-presenting with Marty Hansen from Jordan Lawrence.

SharePoint User Group St. Louis
December 13, 2011: 8:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
Topic: Managing Records in SharePoint – Step 1: Develop Retention Rules that Work
In addition to the topic outlined above, I’ll be walking through a code snippet that shows how to program your own retention policy. This lecture will be following a lecture by several folks from Knowledge Lake who will be talking about Enterprise Content Management in SharePoint.​​​