Today we are at Microsoft London (Victoria) for the penultimate run of an event that started in Lisbon just over a month ago and has toured an additional 7 European cities (Milan, Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen, Utrecht, Stockholm) thus far and coming to a close in Edinburgh in the next week or so.
The vendors and SharePoint solutions are from some major players in our space – ABBYY, AvePoint, Combined Knowledge, K2, oh and of course Microsoft!
The official event overview & agenda states:
Microsoft, K2, AvePoint, Combined Knowledge and Abbyy have teamed up to bring a complimentary Roadshow in 8 cities around Europe, filled with subject matter experts, insightful presentations, demos, food, fun, and prizes!
Pasted from <http://eu.avepoint.com/sharepoint-solutions-roadshow/>
The Future of SharePoint
Or not… agenda item but not covered… 🙁
Key Strategic planning topics for SharePoint deployments
Steve Smith, Owner & SharePoint MVP, Combined Knowledge (www.combined-knowledge.com)
Excellent realistic overview of the project life-cycle involved in a significant SharePoint project – starting 12-18 months out from Go-Live through to near live internal marketing and training activities
Also some serious warning – “A company needs to go into SharePoint with their eyes wide open!”
Agenda –
Build the team
Adoption considerations
Planning timeline
Who needs training when
Training methods
Support considerations
Measurement
The Final Roadmap
Building the team
(Far too much politics in large deployments preventing proper deployments)
What does the business want out of the product?
Realistic expectations
Team should reflect these expectations
CEO – good top down vision
Users – different user expectations
Developers –
Administrators
Business analysts
Training department
Adoption considerations
Business process
Technology
Users
Technology is the answer – wrong
The key to success must include the alignment to the out of the box features
70% fail because of user adoptions.
47% have serious adoption problems.
Adoption is impacted by design.
Design requires the right people at the design phase
You can’t train everyone, if effects RIO
Usability and support go together
It administrators should not be support
Changing design and functionality after go live heavily impacts user buy in and ROI
Adoption and training must be measured
6-18 months before go live
IA and BA – SharePoint functionality and limitations
Technical admins and developers – infrastructure planning, custom development
Power users – SharePoint functionality, SharePoint limitations
Web designers – branding and publishing
Building Business Applications on SharePoint
David… AvePoint (www.avepoint.eu)
Capture and recognition in SharePoint
Patrick Dixon, Channel Manager, ABBYY Group (www.abbyy.com)
Capture -enabled Business Processes
Impressive tools to capture from paper, PDF, or a.n.other and perform complex validation inc. assisting in filling in the blanks, or in the demo an error where a invoice received was stamped over part of the invoice totals – the software recognised and understood the sub-total and VAT amounts and could work out the gross figure and suggest it (to then ensure the metadata is correct)
SharePoint Governance
AvePoint (www.avepoint.eu)
Process Automation in SharePoint
K2 (www.k2.com)
Impressive visual tools for designing and implementing business process automation (BPA) in SharePoint
Reporting capabilities to manage and track real-time
SharePoint Training and Certification
Rob, Trainer, Combined Knowledge (www.combined-knowledge.com)
All Combined Knowledge do is SharePoint training
- Is SharePoint intuitive?
NO – no one in the room thought so, although acknowledge SP2010 is a lot better than previous versions
-
What’s the worst that can happen?
PROJECT FAILURE!!, mismatch of PLAN v REALITY, END USER DISSATISFACTION “We hate SharePoint”
Covered a typical organisation of 2000 people where potentially 1800 aren’t viable for class-room training but can be covered by the likes of CBT/online, Train-the-Trainer, End User Support product, etc.