toronto

I was very excited and humbled to be speaking at another SharePoint Saturday Toronto.  Each year the crowd gets more and more amazing and the speakers just blow your mind with their vast knowledge of SharePoint.  I was in more hardcore, down in the weeds SharePoint conversations than I could of ever imagined and my brain still hurts from it.  Being able to spend quality time with speakers and organizers I don’t get to see very often was amazing and I can’t wait to come back next year.   The organizers did another superb job putting the pieces together to make the event even more amazing last year so BIG shout out to all of you (you know who you are :)).

I was asked to present my  “Build It and They Will Come:  SharePoint User Adoption” presentation which I gladly accepted.  This presentation is one of my favorites as its a true representation of what every organization can aspire to if they truly listen to their employees and work at it.  The success and failure of all projects solely depends on user adoption because if they aren’t utilizing the system then they system is essentially worthless.  Having a few employees using it here and there means there many others doing the same thing some other way.  This type of situation typically means you are experiencing duplicate data, lack of automation, multiple areas of potential human error and over all a divided support system.

Ensuring you have a user adoption strategy and implementing that strategy will ensure ROI (return on investment) for your organization.  However, you must keep in mind in many cases your ROI is not always easy to see or identify.  Remembering that time = money is going to be your first step in identifying your organizations ROI.  Time is going to be associated to # of resources and time to complete day to day tasks within your organization.  Hopefully, my session was helpful to the many who attended my session and those who could not attend but asked me how soon I was going to post my presentation.:).

For those who were not able to attend my session you will find an extra special present inside the presentation linked below.  I wanted to help everyone jump start their user adoption initiatives when they go back to work on Monday.  So after a lot of thought I decided to share the steps on how to build the out of the box corporate directory which got some oohs and ahhs itself.  However, I took it a couple steps further and provided 2 custom display templates.  Both are Item_People template and both have some of the common fields such as extension, mobile phone, office phone, email, etc.  This will allow anyone to very quickly build a custom corporate directory for their organization in less than an hour.  It will have a huge impact on the organization because EVERYONE uses some form of a corporate directory every single day.  It will reach an extremely large percentage of the organization in a very short period of time in addition to changing how certain individuals spend time day to day.

Hope you enjoy and thank you for the amazing time in Toronto!!

Link to my presentation:  BuildItandTheyWillCome_SP2013Toronto