We held our fifth SharePoint Summit on 22 March at the Charing Cross Hotel in London. With keynotes to open and close, six case studies from the UK and Switzerland, and two panel sessions, we hosted over 70 delegates for a day-long look at how organisations are variously moving towards SharePoint 2010.
Jeremy Bentley, CEO of Smartlogic, opened the day for us with a lively and provocative keynote emphasising the continuing relevance of metadata and presenting a forthright argument for automatic, as opposed to manual, classification as the only possible response to the explosion of information in today’s business organisations. Emphasising the key role of good search technology, Jeremy quoted a recent study showing a 1000 person company would save £742k annually through better information searching.
Pushing the boundaries and driving innovation is perhaps where some early adopters and leading edge companies are in respect of SharePoint. At the end of the day, Sharon Richardson of Joining Dots certainly highlighted where she believes SP2010 can promote collaboration and innovation: document sets that are flexible containers for content; permanent URLs that don’t break as information moves; profile matching; editing, tagging and rating, and last but hugely significant, through increasingly sophisticated mobile connectivity.
However, many organisations are not anywhere near that point so it was extremely valuable to be walked through the decade long programmes of SharePoint work at Unisys and EEDA. Jim Downie described how MySites are now being used at Unisys; supplied with Newsgator feeds; featuring presence from Microsoft Office Communication Server (now renamed Lync in its latest version); plus the SP2010 like feature to help signal useful content to followers and the wider community. Jim’s message was KISS* - Keep is simple and social!
Chris Mead from EEDA told a similar story from a public sector perspective: beginning with SharePoint as intranet in 2001 – get a simple common sense navigation system for the intranet and it will serve you well - and coming right up to the present with Business Intelligence functionality – an EEDA balanced scorecard - in SP2007 drawing data from PerformancePoint, EEDA’s own SQL datamart, and other sources brought in through Top Level’s OfficeForms.
In the day’s other public sector case study, Alexis Castillo-Soto described how in the Department for Education, a whole range of information sources and collaboration tools have been developed for SharePoint 2010 in the Cloud under the title The Information Workplace Platform. DfE is piloting a government initiative to set standards for information and knowledge management in the so-called G-Cloud and, if successful, these will be rolled out first across the education sector and then across other government functions. Key to success according to Alexis is ”make life easier for users, make things efficient and quick” and “first impressions are key - you only get one chance to motivate an organisation to change!”.
Ian Coyne from KPMG and Andrew Woolfson from Reynolds Porter Chamberlain LLP opened the afternoon session with a professional services perspective. KPMG had rolled out SP2007 globally in a very short time and Ian described how the clear strengths of a global mindset can conflict with national and specialist team requirements. His key learnings were around the need for piloting both functionality and implementation; the shortcomings of folksonomy in a highly complex organisation where “there are many names for one thing”. Andrew’s paper - Is there an alternative to SharePoint? - advocated the importance of keeping minds and options open when it comes to supporting complex businesses. His memorable phrase, “people don’t mind change, they mind being changed” was tweeted from the hall and then bounced around the Twittersphere for the rest of the day.
UEFA is an organisation where security and access is complex and where groups often function quite independently as its records manager, Elisabeth Bühlmann Herzog, explained in the last case study of the day. Describing how a number of key information sources have been made available through a combination of SharePoint applications and internally developed databases, her conclusion was that it worked at UEFA because it improved presentation of key data, supported collaboration for those whose access regimes were not overly complex, and offered the information managers a useful tool to manage their library inventory following the disbanding of the library itself.
#sp5 as we called it for Twitter, was a good day. Some excellent case studies, much provocation and food for thought, show how the information world is coming to grips with and getting increasing benefits from SharePoint.
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