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!

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?

If you’ve

• struggled to get business engaged in what SharePoint means to them
• felt down at the idea of another meeting talking through a big requirements
  document
• want to try something different, fun and innovative

Take a look at the slide deck below, then get in touch with 21apps who can
help train you in the ways of Innovation Games® or come and run the
games for you.

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.

In November 2010 we were selected as one of the first beta users for the new Microsoft Office365 service and have been playing with it ever since.  At this point we are still running the business critical stuff on the current BPOS service, not because of any issues with Office365 – but because it is a beta 1.

Sneak Peak

The new Office365 admin page is much cleaner and easier to use.  I especially like the menu bar at the top that gives you instant access to the the portal homepage (shown below), outlook web access and your default SharePoint team site as well as the administration pages if you have the rights.

Over the coming weeks and months I, along with my colleagues at 21apps, will be speaking, blogging, tweeting and generally sharing information about Office365.  To try and keep the content focused we expect to break this down into a number of areas

• - Part 1 – Office 365 Summary
• - Part 2 – Office365 -Feature Overview
• - Part 3 – Office365 – Business Scenarios
• - Part 4 – Office 365 in the Public Sector
• - Part 5 – Office365 for Education
• - Part 6 – Office365 the Platform
• - Part 7 – Office365 what does it mean for ITPros
• - Part 8 – Office365 what does it mean for Developers
• - Part 9 – Office365 and Hybrid Organisation
• - Part 10 – How does Office365 compare to the competition
• - Part 11 – Office365 – Transitions, moving to Office365

Talking about Office 365

In January I will be talking about Office365 and doing a short demo during the new SPBizChat.tv on the  20th Jan at 4pm ET  (UK 9pm). 

I will also be taking a whistle-stop tour of Office365 at SharePoint Saturday Online EMEA on 22nd Jan.  Registration for this event opens on the 11th Jan so make sure you get your virtual seat

Should I attend: This session will not be a deep dive into Sandboxed Solutions – this session is aimed at providing the audience with an understanding of where Sandboxed solutions fit, why they would want to use sandboxed solutions, why companies are targeting the sandbox and how this could change the way you work!

If you’re not a developer and want an understanding of what Sandboxed solutions are, this session is for you.

One of the challenges with best practices for a new platform is that a lot of these tend to be emergent at best, invalid at worst or just unknown. With this in mind my sessions at the conference are based on real world work that we have done at 21apps, sharing the lessons we have learnt and looking at the emerging practices that, at the time of writing, feel like they have some grounding in becoming or forming part of an accepted best practice.

The sessions I am presenting are both in the developer track; however they have a different target audience.

Automated Solution Testing with Visual Studio 2010

Audience: Developers, Testers, Project Managers, Team Leads, QA, End Users, Product Managers

Session Level: 300

Time: Wednesday 25^th, 2:45pm – 4:00pm in Lake Ann A

Abstract: In this session we will look at the enhancements to Visual Studio 2010 and how easy it is to automate testing of your SharePoint solutions from the user perspective. With the introduction of the Client Object Model and the fluent UI in SharePoint 2010 UI based testing is increasingly important, the ability to increase testing through automation ensures the quality of your solutions today and into the future. Automated testing is an essential part of your development lifecycle and Visual Studio 2010 makes this possible.

Should I attend: Do you have any involvement in the development, testing, deployment or maintenance of SharePoint solutions? If you do then you will want to attend this session. If you are a user or business owner who is frustrated with poor quality of solutions being provided this session will show what is possible and why there are no excuses.

This is the only session at this year’s Best Practices conference focused specifically on Testing!

Related Sessions:

· Wednesday  2:45-4:00pm, Regency B – Ben Curry, Performance and Capacity Planning 

Real World Sandbox Solutions

Audience: Power Users, Developers, IT Pros, Project Managers, Solutions Architects

Session Level: 200

Time: Thursday 26^th, 2:45pm – 4:00pm in Regency A

Abstract: In this session we will take a look at Sandbox solutions, understanding what they are, why they were introduced and why you would want to build one. Based on a real world project at 21apps we will look at why we chose to build one, how the limitations of the sandbox altered our design and how we mixed server side and client side frameworks to provide the solution. We will also take a look at what the future may be and how Sandboxed solutions could change the face of SharePoint forever!

Should I attend: This session will not be a deep dive into Sandboxed Solutions – this session is aimed at providing the audience with an understanding of where Sandboxed solutions fit, why they would want to use sandboxed solutions, why companies are targeting the sandbox and how this could change the way you work!

If you’re not a developer and want an understanding of what Sandboxed solutions are, this session is for you.

Related Sessions:

· Monday 4:15-5:30, Regency B – Maurice Prather, Understanding and Leveraging the Sandbox

Ask the Experts

I’m also delighted to be taking part in the Development Ask the Experts session on Wednesday 4:30-5:15 at the UserVersity Coffee Lounge.

If you haven’t already signed up I think there are still a few places left. I’m looking forward to meeting up with some folks and of course the infamous SharePint