Part 1 – SharePoint Retreat

Part 2 – What a day!

Part 3 – Going forward

The Problem

Cross sell component

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Requirements:

A client wants to be able to have a component on a page which can be used to drive traffic to other areas of their site.

The setting of the problem actually had a fairly big impact on the way the day went – we captured some some ideas in the feedback at the end of the day that I will cover in Part 3.

The sessions

Session 1 and 2

During the first two sessions there was a lot of discussion around the problem and ways to solve it, what the scope was and if this provided enough information.  Some teams took the opportunity to question the client (Ben Robb) and ask further details about the problem space.  It was very clear from the way the session went that the people in the room tender to deal with the bigger deployment issues and less on the coding. 

At the end of the first session the teams presented (at this stage just talked through) the solution they had come up with.  It was interesting to see that following this session, and with a move around of pairs each team started to approach the problem in a similar way.  Having gained a better understanding of the problem and seeing real value in one of the presented sessions it made them switch their design. 

Lunch

It was originally planned to do a couple of short presentations during Lunch however the weather was so nice we all walked ‘in single file’ to the a park near the office and enjoyed lunch. We only had a few strange looks as we all queued up to eat!

Session 3, 4 and 5

The original request was for the teams to delete the projects, configuration and settings and focus on the muscle memory in getting things setup. But after lunch people had started to get quite competitive and really wanted to try and do that little bit more and some decided to not delete… (they know who they are)

After each session the teams presented their solution,  it was really great to see how changing the teams around and sharing the knowledge really helped to give people a shared understanding. 

Some of the problems seemed harder than others… like adding web part properties

The final solutions really were very impressive and there have already been some great write ups

Martin Hatch

• RCWP Part 1 – Extending the Search Core Results Web Part
• RCWP Part 2 – Web Part with Ribbon Contextual-Tab
• RCWP Part 3 – Edit Web Part using a Ribbon modal dialog

Wes Hacket

• SPRetreat number one

Retrospective

After the session ended and the demos were done there was a little time to get feedback on the first SharePoint Retreat.  There was some great feedback and ideas on how to refine and make the event better which will be covered in Part 3 – Going Forward.

SharePint

The event ended with a SharePint at the local pub before people headed home.