We had a great turnout for the 2nd Twin Cities SharePoint Camp and had a bunch of wonderful speakers. I did a short presentation on Social Networking in SharePoint – Getting Started the Right Way. The gist of the presentation was getting folks to deploy My Sites in their environments and to understand some of the basic concepts behind their deployment. My Sites are a good thing. But like most things in SharePoint – they require proper planning and preparation. We covered the ‘why’s and the ‘how’s. A copy of my slides can be found here on the camp site: Link.
One presentation I particularly enjoyed was by Sarah Haase. She’s doing some wonderful things with SharePoint and walked us through some case studies. We hope to have her present soon at the MNSPUG. One point she made that stuck with me was that the SharePoint sites that are still being used after 6 months after deployment were (a large part of the time – I don’t remember the exact statistic) the ones where an actual plan and design were put together. A plan developed by sitting the potential users of a site down with the SharePoint pros. Sites not planned, generally were no longer being used within 6 mo. Interesting numbers. They’re also doing a really nice job showing actuals to prove out ROI for business units, which is refreshing.
Next up: February MN SharePoint User Group and then TechFuse in March.
See you then!