Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions at the conference, and for putting up with my technical difficulties.
My first session was The Use of SLK as an E-Learning tool. I has a few technical difficulties with this one as the display size changed after I plugged into the projector, so had to skip the demos.
My second session was My Sites – How to use or not. This one was inspired by the talk given by Mark Eichenberger at the SharePoint Best Practices conference in April.
Alex and I would like to say thanks to everyone involved in the first Learning Gateway Conference, whether you were a speaker, attendee or helper. You all helped to make it a great day.
Extra special thanks to the speakers, without whom the day wouldn’t have been as good as it was.
We hope that you all enjoyed it and took some great information and tips away with you.
It’s now been a few days since the event and I’m catching up on the day job’s work! The effort required is beginning to fade, so were already starting to think about planning another one!
While implementing the generate quote page for the Learning Gateway Conference I was storing the quote details in a My Sql database. Normally I use Sql Server, but that’s an optional extra on my hosting plan, so I went for MySql which is included, thinking how different can it be. I’d already got had some experience of working with it while integrating with Moodle.
So I had everything up an running nicely on my development server, until I uploaded the code to the live server, then suddenly, bang, the database calls stopped working with the exceptions talking about an invalid query. I finally tracked it down to the case-sensitivity of the table names in MySql. In windows, the table names are case-insensitive, while on Linux the table names are case-sensitive, and my ISP hosts the MySql databases on Linux machines.
The most annoying thing is that I’m normally very careful about case-sensitivity, but didn’t pay attention to it in this specific case. Moral of the story is always be case-sensitive when coding even if you don’t have to be.
Alex Pearce (SharePoint MVP & Learning Gateway and ICT Manager for the largest school in Europe) and myself are pleased to announce that we are holding a conference devoted to Microsoft Learning Gateway on 15th July at the Belfry near Birmingham.
As far as we know this is the first conference dedicated to Microsoft Learning Gateway in the world and we are really pleased to hold it in the UK. It shows the strength of the Learning Gateway community in the UK. We’ve got an excellent set of speakers (and me) covering a wide range of topics.
Although there is a cost involved, £150 + VAT, we feel that it is well worth the money, both for the information you’ll get from the sessions and the opportunity to network with your peers using SharePoint in education. There’s more information and registration available at the conference web site.
