The 2010 edition of the New Zealand SharePoint Conference is a wrap. It was a second very good day … I am so pleased I came. The conference drew about 300-350 people, and there were … (my guess) … at least 200 for the closing panel discussion at 4.15pm today. That’s impressive.

My schedule today was around business and customer sessions:

• Paul Culmsee from Seven Sigma Business Solutions (Perth, Australia) talked about “the one best practice to rule them all” in relation to SharePoint and wicked problems. After defining wicked problems, and the nature of them, he talked about what happens in SharePoint projects. The one practice? Getting shared understanding of the destination. The way to do it? Dialogue mapping.
• Grant Margison from Information Leadership (New Zealand) talked about “SharePoint 2010: ECM Game Changer?” It was very evident that Grant and his team have done some deep thinking about where and how the new capabilities of SharePoint 2010 enhance ECM, and where there are areas of lack … and he had a very nifty way of displaying the new reality. Grant also showed some of their new product development work to extend the records management capabilities of SharePoint — very cool.
• Mattias Karlsson from Enfo Zipper in Sweden flew 35 hours down here to talk about how Volvo was using SharePoint. It was very interesting to see what Volvo was doing, both for collaboration sites and the Intranet. I must learn more. He also talked about what to do with sites at the end of a collaboration project, and we were able to talk about this afterwards. In my world, this is a key theme when governing SharePoint for collaboration.
• After lunch, Briget Lander, Helen Rayner, Nadine Burnet, and Ruth Miles from Telecom New Zealand presented an update on their journey with SharePoint for the Intranet and collaboration sites. There were some very complex looking information architecture diagrams in the presentation! It was neat to hear Helen talk about their approach to business engagement and user adoption … especially since the approach aligns with my recommendations in SharePoint Roadmap and User Adoption Strategies.
• I skipped the next session, and instead had a 50-minute Industry Analyst discussion with Ryan Duguid from Microsoft. We talked about SharePoint “15” (particularly what I’d like to see around calendaring integration between SharePoint, Exchange, mobile devices, and Outlook), 7 Pillars, and a few other things. Very helpful … thanks Ryan. I got an insight into life at Microsoft that I haven’t had before.
• The last session of the day was “Ask the Experts”. Nick Hadlee (Datasouth), Mark Orange (Knowledge Cue), Daniel MacPherson (ZevenSeas), Ryan Duguid (Microsoft), and Steve Smith (Combined Knowledge) took the stage. There were many questions from the floor … eg, “When is custom development a bad choice?”, “Are the use of folders best practice for SharePoint 2010?”, “What’s your favorite feature?”, and “What is the one feature of SharePoint 2010 that will cause the most pain in 2 years time?”, among others.

So … a great second day … a great community conference … thanks to Debbie, Mark and Chan for their organizational wizardry.

Tomorrow I am attending two four-hour post-conference workshops, including Paul Culmsee and Chan Kulathilake’s workshop on Governance … from 1.30pm to 5.30pm. What a way to finish a week!