SharePoint Saturday Redmond Presentation

I got a lucky offer from Karuana Gatimu to help Carrie Doring present her presentation at SharePoint Saturday in Redmond. She was supposed to speak on "The Future of the Social Collaboration Experience - A platform and community overview for beginners". I have been working on finding ways to speak and present more and had some recent opportunities with the MS IT Institute and MS IT Showcase teams. This was a different opportunity for me.

Luckily, much of what Carrie and I were going to talk about was what we were actually using to manage our preparation for the presentation. Karuana sent us a copy of the deck. I stored that copy on my OneDrive for Business and shared it out to Carrie. She and I had a couple of chats on Lync to sync up on preparation. We met together to work on it in the web version of PowerPoint so we both could make updates at the same time. It was great to use this as an example as we walked through our presentation.

The audience was awesome and had some great questions. They were quite open to the information including the community involvement information I gave them. I was able to squeeze in a plug for #TheKrewe of TechEd when I was talking about community. After the presentation was over, I even got to spend some time personally with a couple of the audience members to talk specifics to their situation.

I had a blast and had to be ushered out by the following presenter a bit. I think that I will be doing more of this. To quote the old Life commercials ... "I think he likes it!"

By the way, here is a link to the deck as a PDF file that can be downloaded by anyone.

Is SharePoint 2013 Slow? Did You Check AV?

Have you ever started troubleshooting a performance issue with an application? Nothing else can be more frustrating that trying to resolve performance issues. Recently, I have been doing this on a SharePoint 2013 Server installation. Pages take a while, up to 5 to 6 seconds, to render the page properly. Sometimes, it was taking up to 20 seconds to render. I have been doing adjustments to the system as well as warming up the application pools. Much of this I will post on here in the future.

I listen to net/podcasts and thanks to Todd Klindt's Netcast, specifically Episode 152 - Splat Bang Click Hieroglyph, I found a possible answer for some of the performance issues I was seeing. He brought up Microsoft Support KB 952167 which is named "Certain folders may have to be excluded from antivirus scanning when you use file-level antivirus software in SharePoint". I had totally forgotten that AV scanning live systems like Exchange, SharePoint or SQL can make them crawl at times. It heavily affects PACS systems in healthcare, the Picture Archive and Communication System, for radiology imaging. I should have known better and went to the AV System Admin and asked to have these exceptions put in. Result was some improvement of the rendering. There's more to do but this did help.