Yesterday I had the pleasure of being able to speak together with my coworker André Krijnen at SharePoint Connect 2014 in Amsterdam. An annual event that with it’s 500 attendees is visited by many from the SharePoint community both in The Netherlands and from abroad. With a broad spectrum of sponsors and lots of great international speakers this event is a definite must go for those interested in SharePoint in the Benelux area.

Although I’ve been speaking at conferences for more then a few years now doing it here, for a SharePoint audience was a first and I hope we managed to struck a chord. Our slide deck is added below.

Abstract:

“SharePoint is the complete solution for collaboration, document management and sharing knowledge across our organisation, and even beyond. It will drive our business!” For the last ten years it was this message IT-departments used to get budget-approval to implement the platform we all know and love (and yes, sometimes hate). The reality is though that lots of companies struggle to get beyond using it as an intranet or document file storage. What happened to our promise to cover not just the ‘sharing’ and ‘storage’ part but really enhance our business processes with specific functionality tailored to the collaborative working? Like HR who needs functionality to support annual reviews, quality control who wants to monitor key performance indicators or the support departments who want to gage customer satisfaction? “No problem!”, most IT departments standard Pavlov reaction to these request was: “we’ll build it …!” But that takes lots of time, money and can cause massive delays which often also begs the question: isn’t there another way? Aren’t we inventing the wheel when others surely have already done so?