The second of the two Intranet Leadership Forum presentations that I came to Australia to deliver was held in Canberra this morning. With Canberra being the locale of federal government for Australia, pretty much all of the people in the room were from government departments. We had a beautiful conference room in one of the government buildings, with tea, coffee and chocolate biscuits (much to Catherine’s delight) … so many thanks to Jared and Kate for hosting us all.

The session was the same as the one from yesterday in Sydney, although I did try to remember some of the comments from the Sydney people to certain points of the presentation and add that into today’s session for intra-chapter knowledge sharing. The same issues that Sydney ILFers are facing are being faced by Canberra ILFers … management with over-hyped expectations, a drastic lack of skilled people to support and customize SharePoint (one attendee noted that they have recently hired four SharePoint developers … two from Canberra, one they fly in from Sydney each week, and one from India — although in terms of the latter, I didn’t pick up whether that person has shifted to Australia or is working from India), and the frustration at how to decide whether SharePoint is the right platform play for them, based on a weighting of the pros and cons that I noted.

The attendees graciously filled out evaluation forms. Some of the comments were:

“Very useful on the real story of SharePoint.“

“Balanced presentations of pros and cons.“

“Great coverage of the topic, on target, entertaining, well paced, honest comment — not a sales pitch. Good Q&A opportunity.“

“The session has helped me realize that we have only scratched the service of SharePoint capability. We are using SharePoint for content management.“

“Confirmation of all my suspicions about SharePoint.“

I took a “must do better at that” thought away from today’s session. I didn’t get much sleep last night, and felt rather exhausted after the demands of yesterday and the ones of today … and so didn’t mix-and-mingle as I could / should have. I tended to stand aloof during the breaks and before the session, whereas I should have just walked up to the different people, stuck out my hand and introduced myself. I need to do this … I need to get better at this … I will do better next time.