Lessons Learned From Australia and New Zealand SharePoint Conferences
I am finally back in the Seattle office after two weeks abroad helping to launch our new North Sydney, Australia office, and presenting at the regional SharePoint conferences in downtown Sydney, Australia (#AUSPC) and Wellington, New Zealand (#NZSPC).
As a Bronze sponsor of both events, the Axceler team was able to meet many of the participants, introducing ourselves and having great discussions around ControlPoint and Davinci Migrator and the opportunities for growth in each market. Joining me on the ground in Sydney were Garry Smith, Sergio Otoya, and our new in-region Channel Manager, Vijay Raghvani – who also joined me for the event in New Zealand. Thanks again to Debbie Ireland, Mark Orange (Mr Anti-Twitter), and Nick Hadlee for their hard work in organizing these conferences, and giving us the opportunity to participate. New friendships were forged, business partnerships discussed, and customer opportunities uncovered.
I was also able to squeeze in fantastic day of hiking over the weekend on the Tongariro Crossing, which is where they filmed scenes from Mt. Doom in the Lord of the Rings films (pictures on Facebook).
In addition to my sessions on metadata (my slides from New Zealand are below), I was invited to participate on the experts panel on the main stage at both shows. As always, there was great participation and ample questions from the attendees, inside and outside of the sessions – which will fuel blog posts here and on my personal blog for weeks to come. But as I was sitting on the flight home, I started thinking about my “Lessons Learned” from these events, and thought I’d share my takeaways:
- People need a personal connection.
Having managed people and teams remotely, you quickly learn that there is no replacement for face-time. One layer deeper is the value of spending time with partners and customers at these events, and building lasting relationships. These global events are hard work, and generally include working across 2 or 3 time zones, getting your regular work done while on the road. But the long-term value of building those personal connections can be invaluable.
- You can’t trump real world experience.
No amount of planning and quality assurance preparation can prepare you entirely for what your user community throws at you. There is no such thing as a homogenous SharePoint deployment – that’s why it makes sense to spend as much time as possible talking to customers and the end user community about that they are experiencing.
- Insert a little humor – people appreciate it.
I’ve attended dozens of SharePoint events over the past year, and the most memorable (whether business or technically-focused) were those where the presenter made an effort to entertain as well as inform the audience. My perception is that the SharePoint crowd is a pretty funny group, thankfully.
- My rear end is not built for long flights.
I am open to ideas on this one. Seriously.
As for my sessions, I gave a 100-level introduction to metadata and governance entitled ‘Looking Under the Hood: How Your Metadata Strategy Impacts Everything You Do’ and had over 100 participants at each location. Based on feedback from the events, I plan to add some additional examples around Lists and List Views, and am thinking about inserting a video with examples of taxonomy and folksonomy in a 2010 environment. I’ll be presenting this session again at SharePoint Saturday Boston on April 9th. Here are the slides: