TechEd Australia 2009 - SharePoint on-premises or in the cloud?

How cold is it at the moment....brrrr!  Luckily Tech Ed Australia 2009 will be on the Gold Coast this year bring on the sunshine baby.

If I can manage to get off the beach and into the auditorium, this year I will be co-presenting a session with Lee Hickin on the differences between SharePoint on-premise and SharePoint Online part of the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).  During the session we hope to provide the following information;

• Learn SharePoint customisation techniques that will work in BPOS or on-premise
• Describe provisioning options for SharePoint – in-house, hosted, cloud
• Understand pros/cons for each model
• Demonstrate SharePoint designer and Office customisations to SharePoint

In order to make the session a little more interesting we would like to get some participation from the community so we are going to run a little competition.  We are going to get several community members to create a highly customised and funky SharePoint Online site which will be reviewed for originality, style, design and also what features from the online platform have been utilised.

The winner of the competition will get to present their solution on stage during our session as well as getting a prize.  If you are interested in getting involved please register through the call for content as described on Andrew Coate’s blog.

Lee and I will work thru the list of people who register thru the Call For Content tool and let the eligible people know how to access their SharePoint Online site to start customising.  I am looking forward to seeing some really interesting sites come out of this.