Sri Lanka’s SharePoint Saturday debuts successfully

Sri Lanka’s IT enthusiasts participated in the first of many lined up SharePoint Saturdays on 11June at the Informatics Institute of Technology (IIT). Bringing together over 250 IT professionals, IT undergraduates and technology enthusiasts, as well as two industry experts, the event was one of a series of events hosted by the global community of Sharepoint Saturday.

The event was brought to Sri Lanka through the efforts of Innovative-e and Microsoft Sri Lanka, to create an opportunity to discuss this fast-spreading collaborative technology in Sri Lanka. SharePoint Saturday is a series of events held by this global community in order to educate professionals utilising the programme. The day consists of an informal and lively day of sessions conducted by respected SharePoint professionals and Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) covering a wide variety of SharePoint oriented topics. SharePoint is a simple and user-friendly web application platform developed by Microsoft which enables user organisations to manage and provision multiple intranet portals, extranets, websites, document management, business intelligence tooling, social networking tools, information integration and a lot more. Addressing S r i Lanka’s need for both innovative technologies such as SharePoint and local industry experts, Microsoft Sri Lanka’s Developer Platform Evangelism Director, Wellington Perera stated, “Bringing this knowledge injection to the local techies was definitely a much needed boost. Newer technologies and newer prospects are always needed to keep an industry going. And SharePoint with its capabilities is offering innumerous ways to get more things done faster with fewer resources.” SharePoint has become one of the most sought after collaboration technologies in the local industry that has been hindered due to absence of the necessary technology experts. However, SharePoint Saturday has enabled Innovate-e and Microsoft Sri Lanka to create awareness and provide the needed foundation to educate and engage more experts within this arena. Microsoft Sri Lanka has currently extended SharePoint technology to over 20 partners. SharePoint Saturday featured a day long event with two international specialists; Michael Noel and Dux Raymond Sy. Noel, an internationally recognised tech guru, bestselling author and renowned public speaker has covered sessions on SharePoint in over 113 countries, with Sri Lanka being his latest. Dux Raymond Sy, with over 15 years of experience in the field, is a SharePoint MVP and is the chief evangelist of Innovative-e Inc., a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner who is also the platinum sponsor of this event. The other speakers included Prabath Fonseka – MVP who heads the Sri Lanka SharePoint Forum, Dinesh Priyankara (MVP), Joy Ratnayake (MVP) , J. Sri Kantha, ShakeerMajeed Khan, and HasangaAbeyaratne. Speaking of the event, Noel said, “It was a fantastic experience to have been a part of SPS Sri Lanka and that too being my first ever visit to the country. I was surprised to see such enthusiasm in the local industry for SharePoint. There’s definitely a lot of potential here and prospects for expanding the human capital in this area and I certainly hope to come back for more”. Ruwan Fernando, Managing Director — Innovative-e, hosting partner of this event said, “I believe that it is of immense benefit to the local IT industry to immerse itself in such a fantastic technology and to know the A-Zs of using this highly demanded collaboration tool so that a valid foundation could be built for sustaining a new trend in technology growth.” SharePoint Saturday Sri Lanka was supported by several top local IT companies including Platinum Sponsor Millennium IT, Gold Sponsor Creative Solutions and Silver Sponsors Greenwich, Virtusa and Sanje Lanka.