In 25 days I’ll be boarding one of Air New Zealand’s Boeing 777-300ER planes and heading to Los Angeles, and then taking a couple of domestic flights in the United States to get to Atlanta. My long-haul flight this time is for the inaugural SharePoint Conference in the United States. I’m looking forward to it. I’ve attended the two previous Share Conferences in Australia, but missed the South African conference last month.

I will be presenting two sessions:

• Keynote on April 25, entitled Success with SharePoint: Earning the Right to Seek Executive Support. Many IT departments have installed SharePoint and are now wondering how to make the technology deliver business value. A quick answer is often to seek executive support, but before rushing to do so, there are a number of critical disciplines that need to be put in place to earn the right for making this approach.
• Post-Conference Workshop on April 26, on Strategies for User Adoption. This workshop provides a forum for learning and engagement about encouraging user adoption. User adoption has always been the number-one challenge for new collaboration tools, and the emergence of SharePoint has increased the adoption challenge. With SharePoint being home to many capabilities such as, document management, team sites, social collaboration, and business intelligence, etc., how do you approach the challenge of gaining adoption to ensure the achievement of the desired business value?

I also have a role to play in one of the facilitated discussions on the Monday afternoon, with Dux taking the leading role in the presentation and facilitation of that pre-conference workshop. I think we’ve cooked up a connective approach to starting the conference – hope you’ll be there for that if you’re attending Share 2012.

Beyond what I’m doing though, the rest of the agenda looks fabulous. I’m really looking forward to hearing as many presentations as I can attend, and learning from the experiences of others … but with the conference having four simultaneous tracks, while there is something for everyone, one can’t attend everything you’d like to. So there will be some tough choices to make. I’ll leave that for my long-haul flight though – there’s too much to be done before heading away to face those decisions from this distance.

Are you attending Share 2012 in Atlanta? If so, I look forward to meeting you there.