Sharing the Point, South America and Antarctica!

Today, my colleagues and I are beginning our trek to Sharing The Point, South America and Antarctica. Yes, you read that right: Antarctica! We’ll come back to that in a moment.

Sharing the Point South America 2012 is a community driven initiative designed to help educate users about the potential of the SharePoint platform. I am joined by world-renowned experts including Joel Oleson, Michael Noel, Paul Swider, Mark Miller, Ricardo Munoz, Fernando Hunth, Ariel Garcia Sobrino, and Fabian Imaz. Together, we’ll produce half-day SharePoint events throughout South America (and Antarctica):

1/21/2012 - Buenos Aires, Argentina

1/23/2012 - Montevido, Uruguay

1/24/2012 - Santiago, Chile

1/26/2012 - Villa las Estrellas, Antartica

Reaching out to and into these communities is made possible by our sponsors, fpweb.net and AvePoint, which by the way, is celebrating the launch of its enterprise-class management platform for SharePoint governance, DocAve 6, yesterday. Thanks to these sponsors, we can spend time sharing our experiences as a community. We’ll be presenting sessions running the gamut of IT to development to business, sharing best practices, lessons learned, and practical solutions.

All the details are at the Sharing the Point website.

This is going to be a fantastic journey. I highly recommend following us on Facebook  or on Twitter. On Twitter, you can also follow the #STPSouthAmerica hash tag.

Or you can follow me or any of the other participants… I’m sure there will be lots of great stories coming from this experience.

Oh, and yes, ANTARCTICA! Let’s talk about that!

We’ll be traveling from Patagonia, Chile (Punta Arenas) to Villa Las Estrellas, in the Chilean sector of Antarctica. The area is home to research stations for Chile, Russia, and China, and was the first place in Antarctica to house civilians. The summertime (it is summer there right now) temperatures are balmy—in the 30s (Fahrenheit, 0-3 Celsius), the sun is up almost all day, and the population hits its peak of 120 humans, along with thousands of penguins and seals.

Believe it or not, we'll be doing a SharePoint activity there, to ensure we’ve brought SharePoint to every corner of the planet. We’re not sure what that activity will be yet: a podcast, a video cast, tech support for the local SharePoint implementation (they do use SharePoint at the research station), or a recording that we bring back to broadcast when we return to more reliable Internet connections.

Some fun facts for you!

- This is the 100th Anniversary of the “Discovery” of Antarctica. There’s a great article at National Geographic about it. 

- Humans first intentionally stayed the winter in Antarctica in 1899, according to the Australian Government's website about the continent. 

-Think you might want to work down there? or study penguins?