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.

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.