I'm in Sydney for the Intranets 2012 conference over the next two days. James Robertson, Managing Director of Step Two Designs, is giving the welcome and overview of the next couple of days – the conference is on today and tomorrow, and there are workshops on Friday. James mentioned that we have a much larger number of international speakers this year.

The conference is being held at the Amora Hotel in Jamison Street for the second year. There's about 120 in attendance this year. Intranets 2011 was a great conference last year. I'm looking forward to the conference this year.

Following the welcome and administrative notices, James talked about the changing face of intranets. Key points:
– (1) there are four trends driving the change.
– … (a) access to powerful new technology – it's enabling us to do things we have never done before. The technology coming in via IT decisions is giving permission to re-think what we do with intranets.
– … (b) the nature of business is changing – worldwide recession, doing more with less, a greater awareness that we need to embrace change. It's opening opportunities for intranet people to help with these changes. Equally, there is a new push around being collaborative, doing social things, etc.

– … (c) the intranet community has burst into life – compared to 10+ years ago when Step Two Designs started, there is a lot of interest / discussion / passion about the topic of intranets. Recent changes – intranet groups on LinkedIn (eg., 11,000 on Worldwide Intranet Challenge), bloggers about the intranet, an awareness of international speakers in Australia. James's assertion – this greater community will change everything.

– … (d) collectively, we've learnt so much – there's a big body of knowledge available about how to do this stuff. Some is written down, some is in people's heads.
– (2) therefore: the conference gives us the opportunity to do two things – (a) solving today's problems, and (b) heading intranets in exciting new directions.
– … (a) the conference has been designed around this. There are two streams; each is focused on either today's problems or tomorrow's directions.