And it begins again! Yesterday we kicked off preparations for our Fall iteration of SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities, to be held on Saturday, November 3rd, 2012 at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, MN. As you probably know, SharePoint Saturdays are free educational events dedicated to fostering information exchange and networking opportunities for SharePoint end-users, developers and IT Pros. These SharePoint Saturday events occur in local markets throughout the world, wherever there are SharePoint peeps that want to come together and share what they know.

We are blessed to have an amazing SharePoint community in the Twin Cities. Our balmy Minnesota winters have attracted the likes of Bill English, Virgil Carroll, Wes Preston, Raymond Mitchell, Tamara Bredemus and Phil Wicklund. When you have this much local talent, you can get a jump start on building a great educational event. Mix in a strong leadership team and a community that gets excited about attending SharePoint events (even on a Saturday) and you have a hit!

When I first got involved with the Twin Cities SharePoint Camp three years ago, I was thrilled to find an opportunity to learn from and network with other SharePoint enthusiasts. We started out small, with 75-100 people attending Saturday events at a local training center. But after adopting the SharePoint Saturday mantle and forming a leadership team to guide the events, we’ve grown to staggering proportions. Take a look at the growth curve in our number of attendees:

Our last event (held in April 2012) had nearly 30 sponsors, 28 breakout sessions, 2 hands-on labs and 450+ attendees. For a recap of the day, see my summary blog post:  https://sarahlhaase.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/spstc-smashes-our-previous-record-becoming-one-of-the-largest-sharepoint-saturdays-ever/

The pressure is clearly on to maintain the quality of our SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities events. We want to continue pulling in great speakers and offering a great opportunity for attendees to learn and connect. With that in mind, we’ve opened the call for speakers for our November 3rd event. If you have a SharePoint story, please put together an abstract and submit to present. All the submission details are posted on our web site: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/twincities