SharePoint Conference Austria 2012

Last week the SharePoint Conference Austria took place in Vienna. As a main sponsor Solvion was part of the keynote and some other sessions. For the first time we were there with eleven people. Talking to guys interested in our services or other SharePoint people from across the country. Check out some pictures on our Facebook page.

Also you can download the slides of all our sessions here. For all none German readers some quick links: Keynote, CIO Session, and Boost your SharePoint session.

The feedback was quite well on all our sessions, so maybe there is some relevant information. Personally I was quite happy with the full session room. Stefan and I enjoyed it because of the troubles we had heads up with switching rooms few days before the conference.

In our Boost your SharePoint session we tried to give some help towards end user adoption. We talked about challenges we faced in our projects and some solutions to them. But as we get focused on creating the slides it came clear that non of our challenges where technical only. It’s always about people and their emotions, not about the technical questions every project has. I guess that’s quite a lesson for all the hard core coders out there. But you will face it sooner or later. I’ll think about some blog posts to dig deep here. Especially after reading a great book by Paul Clumsee and Kailash Awati. Also check out Paul’s blog, it has all you need. Real technical hints and strategic or management questions get solved there.

There are tools solving some of our end user adoption challenges. By now the best is harmon.ie. The tight Outlook integration is kind of a first step for many users. They are used to working within the Outlook window and being capable of accessing documents from there is a huge step forward. Check out the videos harmon.ie put on their page. I simply love this kind of marketing. Also they are quite aware in terms of social media. My colleague Stef put out a tweet with our slides mentioning harmon.ie. And he got a retweet by teamharmonie with in minutes. As the rumors about SharePoint vNext are raising it will be a interesting point to see features Microsoft built in terms of Outlook integration. Can’t wait for the public beta, but I think harmon.ie as all other major 3rd party vendors will have a market even with the next SharePoint versions.

All the German content on our homepage makes me think about writing in English or German. But I guess, I’ll stick to English. There are “only” 125 Million people speaking German out there and I think the SharePoint guys within this 125 Million are able to understand my posts too. At least I hope so.