Gus Fraser (@gusfraser) recently made the move to Jersey and being active in the SharePoint community has worked hard to get the 1st event off the ground.  Myself and Ant are delighted to be able to support this event and would love to see you there – perhaps we could get some French SharePoint’ers to make the hop over.

It also just so happens that the session finishes just after the last plane leaves! That means we will be have to stay and support the biggest SharePoint social event – SharePint   – It’s a hard life but someone has to do it…..

Check out the agenda, if you can justify a night out in the channel islands then sign up and join us or follow the events via twitter tag #CISPUG and #SharePint

While Andrew will be doing his cool stuff at the International SharePoint Conference in London, I’ll be ‘across the pond’ at the awesome SharePoint Business focussed conference Share2012 Atlanta!

It is a huge honour to be accepted as a speaker for this great 2 day business focussed conference, and as a sneak-preview, this is what I’ll be adding to the mix in Atlanta next April:

I’ll be running a session on the Wednesday:
Hybrid Organisations: How SharePoint Online can deliver

AND!

On the Thursday I’ll be running an all-day exclusive workshop:
SharePoint Innovation Games(R) for Requirements Gathering

21apps are so very excited that we can support this event with the great guys at Eventful Group; we hope to see you there and there will be more details coming soon!

It was a great surprise to receive an email from Computer Weekly saying that I was a finalist in the Computer Weekly Social Media Awards 2011 for IT Industry Blogger of the year.

This blog was started in 2004 when I saw the way software development landscape changing with lots of interest in the idea of software factories.  As with most blogs getting into the habit of blogging regularly takes some time, this one was no different – but when it did start I found that my interests and work had become more filled with SharePoint and so in 2005 the blog started the journey that it has continued ever since.

If you have found anything on this site interesting, has helped you out over the years or just want to promote SharePoint blogs to the top of the tree I would be very humbled and grateful if you took a few moments and voted for me – could it be  Andrew Woodward, SharePoint Blogger named Computer Weekly IT Industry Blogger of the year? 

For me it was kinda poignant because last years SharePoint Saturday UK was my first day working at 21apps and what a year it’s been!

Anyway, this year we decided to go all out:

• 21apps having a stand for the first time!
• I did a session – ‘Measuring the Intangible, SharePoint Social ROI’
• Andrew & myself ran a SharePoint Innovation Games(R) workshop!

The 21apps stand 1st thing in the morning before we started 'playing'

The morning was manic with all of our sessions done by lunchtime, giving us all afternoon to play Innovation Games(R) on our stand and we had a stack of awesome conversations with the attendees and vendors.

We had some great feedback on our first ‘SharePoint Social ROI’ Session:

The slides are here if you missed the session:

Next session before lunch was our SharePoint Innovation Games(R) workshop. If you’ve not come across Innovation Games(R) (www.innovationgames.com) before, then here’s a great overview by Andrew:

It was really well attended, with over 30 people split into two groups.

1. The first with Andrew played the ‘Buy a Feature’ game
2. The second group with myself played the ‘Product Box’ game

Here’s some photo’s and feedback from the sessions:

Our SharePoint Innovation Games workshop was a huge success!

Who knew SharePoint people could have so much fun with boxes, glue, glitter and sticky-things!

Sample Product Boxes attendees created representing their perfect Social SharePoint Intranet

Serious concentration as attendees collaborate to buy their most needed blender features!

We’ll post some video’s of the sessions on the 21apps YouTube channel later this week.

If you want to find out more about our Innovation Game(R) services then follow the links below or get in touch with us:

http://www.21apps.com/what-we-do/innovation-games-training/

http://www.21apps.com/what-we-do/serious-games-facilitation/

If you want to find out more about our SharePoint services then follow the links below or get in touch with us:

http://www.21apps.com/what-we-do/governance-kickstart/

http://www.21apps.com/what-we-do/sharepoint-rescue-mission/

http://www.21apps.com/our-model/

The speaker dinner the evening before... What can I say?

Being a community event, 21apps have gone the whole hog this year and taken a Gold Sponsorship package.  The sponsorship money helps to keep the event completely free to attend meaning we get to see a lot of people join the community that just can’t get sign off on the bigger events.

We also have a couple of speaking slots this year.

Ant Clay – Measuring the Intangible, SharePoint Social ROI. 

#spsuk17 – 10:20 to 11:20 in the Friar Tuck Room 3B

This session is an advance on the great blog post Ant did back in April and is likely to also include some of the content from my post – Defining measurable outcomes from SharePoint. 

Andrew Woodward and Ant Clay – SharePoint Innovation Games® Workshop

#spsuk38 11:45 – 12:45 Theatre Nottingham Castle

If you have followed 21apps over the past year you will know that we are advocates of using Innovation Games to help find out what really is the most important things to do – but in a fun way….  using Serious Games to Do Work.

In this session we plan to get hands on and actually play some games so that you get a real feel for the value of using games – and why they are useful and not just an excuse to mess around.

Exhibition Hall

As sponsors we get a stand in the exhibition hall and we would love for you to come and visit us, say hello and talk to us about your SharePoint woes.  We promise not to baffle you with technology or the latest applications, but we will talk to you about how your SharePoint deployment is working for you and see if your willing to take part in our all day mass SharePoint Innovation Games.

It wouldn’t be a stand if we didn’t have something to hand you,  if you like you can down our Innovation Games Postcards and our 21apps Services.

Hope to see you all there,  please do stop us and say hello.

Whats an Unconference you may be asking?

According to Wikipedia.

An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term “unconference” has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees, sponsored presentations, and top-down organization.

The event started at 6pm – slightly earlier than normal SUGUK events as we needed time to select the sessions.  As it turned out we had less presented content and much more open discussion.

Introductions

Unlike normal conferences, where the events are pre defined and people only really get the details of the speakers.  An unconference is all about the attendees.  John Sanders got us started by getting everyone to introduce themselves and what their interest/role was with SharePoint. 

This is a great way to get everyone participating,  and I have seen it done with over 100 people (but you need to be fairly brief with your intro in this case).  It was interesting that we didn’t have any dedicated SharePoint developers at this event.

Session Ideas

People shouted out either something they wanted to talk about, had prepped or wanted to others to talk about.  Once listed each person had 2 votes and they marked their top two preferences (as below).

The selected discussion topics were

• End User Adoption
• Branding and Themes
• Search

End User Adoption

No one had a presentation for this so we opened the floor and looked at some of the challenges we have with end user adoption (BAD) and some of the ways people had addressed these or had real successes (GOOD).

The list is no way definitive but was based on the experiences of the people present.

BAD

• Seen as IT led
• No interest
• Not like folders/shared drives
• Too big
• Technology scary
• Culture change
• If not social networking it a tough sell
• Browser differences
• No exec buy in
• Site steward/sponsor
• Too much power

GOOD

• Understanding Roles (Steward etc)
• Training Education
• Phased introduction – “Bite Size”
• Context – How it’s used in your enterprise
• Meeting workspace and calendar (quick wins)
• People finder / search
• Identity problems
• Community
• Not to be see as an IT project
• Don’t turn everything on
• Don’t call it SharePoint
• New way of working

Branding

@Mattmoo2 offered to do a cut down run through of this branding session which was well received by all.  Matt admitted that he was not a designer but in line with the SharePoint platform it is possible for people to achieve a lot without having to get too technical.  Matt talked about master pages, simple CSS customisations and he even compared using themes to someone drawing on you nice shirt

Matt made reference to his branding series on SP365.  He’s also looking for guest bloggers so if you have an article you’d like to share send it over to @mattmoo2.

There was keen interest in the CSS and lots of ideas for using these back in the office by Mark Ashley @Mark_Flames

Search

The final session was talking about how search in SharePoint is one of the best features.  The consensus from the discussion was however that people still aren’t giving search the love that it needs.

I got up and did did the session on search, starting with some basic understanding of the roles but really focusing on the end user experience and the ways it could be customised easily.  Looking at refinements, best bets, scopes and federated locations – including the use of Bing to federate searches on external web sites.

Big Thanks

Thanks to Aspire/Capgemini for the use of the venue,  it worked really well for these open discussions.  Next time we will need a plasma screen though.  Thanks to Jo Davies (@Little_George) for arranging the venue.  To John Sanders (@JohnnySanders)  wife Nelly (@princessnellie) for organising, collecting and delivering the pizza.  To Matt Huges @mattmoo2 for the branding session and mostly to everyone else who made it a great night

Steve Beard (@Tarannau20), John Sutherland (@frobnitzz), Kate Goodhart, Tom York and Jennifer Deacon (@deaconsulting)

Hopefully we start to make the Telford SUGUK events a more regular thing,  there seems to be a lot of interest.

Oh and thanks to Alan the Fish who was the photographer on the night

Want more?

Check out the suguk website for details of all upcoming events.

To help with the pain we are running an “SUGUK Unconference” in Telford on Thursday 6th of October.

The format for this event will be slightly different to normal SUGUK events.

Start time is 6pm

6:00 – 6:30 Pitch presentation

Yes we want everyone who attends to have the opportunity of doing a 30 minute presentation on anything to do with SharePoint.

6:30 – 6:40 Pick the top 3  – we have 10 minutes to choose the 3 we as a group want to see

6:50 – 7:20 Presentation One

Pizza, drink and networking

8:00 – 8:30 Presentation Two

8:40 – 9:10 Presentation Three

Questions

Optional SharePint << no pub’s close by sadly but we will find one.

Sign up here, would be great to see some new faces and some old ones as well.   And please bring along some things you want to talk about.

the list was to identify the SharePoint thought leaders providing the best guidance for companies looking to increase their social and collaboration capabilities.

I was pleasantly surprised to be listed at number 9.   I’m a big advocate of social tools, especially twitter, but don’t actively go out to boost my ranking – I just like to share my experiences of working with twitter among the community..  my favourite community event being SharePint which being a face to face event likely didn’t feature in the ranking  

Firstly a little bit of background as to why I suggested the session in the first place. 21apps have been focussing more and more on using visualisations and facilitation techniques in our consulting engagements, rather than boring meetings, pointless workshops and reams and reams of documentation that no-one reads. We’ve found that using facilitative techniques is far more effective when working with platforms such as SharePoint from the perspectives of engaging stakeholders, gleaning requirements and developing solutions. There’s certainly a more factual basis to our interest in Innovation Games other than our experience, but that’s subject for our upcoming book!

Specifically we at 21apps are focussing our ‘facilitation through games’ work on Luke Hohmann’s techniques and book Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products and Services. The book (and associated games) roots are in market research and product development, but the fit for platform requirements and technology projects is excellent in our experience.

I wasn’t expecting that many people to attend the session as it wasn’t particularly geeky and it is quite a broad subject area; we were allocated a room that seated about 15 people, when 30 people rocked up it was awesome and quite a squeeze, chairs stolen from other rooms and iPad’s balanced on knees as people sat on the floor (there were a surprising amount of iPads at the unConference)!

Lets get into the session. I hadn’t pre-planned a long presentation or anything, I’d got my roll of MagicWhiteboard, whiteboard pens and post-it notes just in-case we had a chance of a game like ‘Speed Boat’ or ‘Start your Day’, I even contemplated using the ‘name-cards’ as the bases of a quick ‘Product Box’ (or more likely Product Tent!), but the reality was this was a session for exploring and discussing concepts not ‘doing’. I just spent the first couple of minutes kicking things off explaining 21apps perspective on the subject, what I actually meant by ‘Innovation Games’ and how I saw it applying to local government, namely as a means of facilitation, shared understanding and gathering requirements.

The session quickly became a lively conversation and Q&A about all manner of ‘game’ related subjects and we discussed in no particular order:

• How Innovation Games could be used in facilitation (and why traditional business analyst techniques are no longer suitable)
• A number of participants had some great insights into Gamification and some examples of how Gamification could and is being used in local government
• We discussed the basics of game theory
• Lots of discussions about how Innovation Games can be applied to citizen engagement in policy making, consultations and local issues. It was agreed I think that open, long running games would need a layer of Gamification (rewards, recognition etc) in order to be successful
• Finally we discussed the differences in adoption between commercial and local government and between internal and external participants.

Here’s some random snippets of the conversation that spilt over onto Twitter:

During the conversation (over almost an hour rather than the planned 45 mins) we raised a great list of game platforms, examples, websites, books and presentations. I’ve tried to list as many as I could here, I will have missed some, feel free to add them to the comments!

• Innovation Games Site
• Innovation Games Book
• Innovation Games Online
• San Jose, California, Community Leaders Budget Games
• GameStorming Site
• GameStorming Book
• Business Model Generation Site
• Business Model Generation Book
• Empire Avenue
• Dave Briggs / Kind of Digital – The Digital Engagement Game
• Jane McGonigal Games (Inc. EVOKE, Avantis, Superstruct)
• Ted Talks – Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world
• Reality is Broken By Jane McGonigal

That about sums up the session, I had a great time, discussions were awesome, the feedback was positive and I truly think theres a incredible potential for UK local government to adopt Innovation Games and ‘games’ in general to deliver serious benefits. A great example of using Innovation Games in local government is cited here when a group of community leaders and engaged citizens from the City of San Jose played a specially designed Innovation Game® to provide feedback regarding their budget priorities to the Mayor’s office.

Finally, here’s a quick video of me being interviewed by John Popham about the session - Ant talks about Innovation Games in UK Local Government

Sessions:
Session 1 : Paul Grimley- Preparing for Sharepoint 2010 & Real World Experiences.
Abstract: This session will talk about sharing thoughts about how to prepare for SharePoint 2010 whether this be an upgrade or a greenfield implementation and things to consider to make the implementation as successful as possible. I will touch on planning the upgrade / implementation and how best to do it, who to involve, discuss challenges and how to overcome them

Session 2: Andrew Woodward – Office 365
Abstract: A demonstration / discussion of the features being delivered through Office 365 (focussing on Sharepoint 2010)

Location:
Technology Centre
Wolverhampton Science Park
Wolverhampton
WV109TG

Agenda:
6.30pm – Session 1
7:30pm – Refreshments
8:00pm – Session 2
9:00pm – Off to SharePint….