Last week the SharePoint Conference Austria took place in Vienna. As a main sponsor Solvion was part of the keynote and some other sessions. For the first time we were there with eleven people. Talking to guys interested in our services or other SharePoint people from across the country. Check out some pictures on our Facebook page.

Also you can download the slides of all our sessions here. For all none German readers some quick links: Keynote, CIO Session, and Boost your SharePoint session.

The feedback was quite well on all our sessions, so maybe there is some relevant information. Personally I was quite happy with the full session room. Stefan and I enjoyed it because of the troubles we had heads up with switching rooms few days before the conference.

In our Boost your SharePoint session we tried to give some help towards end user adoption. We talked about challenges we faced in our projects and some solutions to them. But as we get focused on creating the slides it came clear that non of our challenges where technical only. It’s always about people and their emotions, not about the technical questions every project has. I guess that’s quite a lesson for all the hard core coders out there. But you will face it sooner or later. I’ll think about some blog posts to dig deep here. Especially after reading a great book by Paul Clumsee and Kailash Awati. Also check out Paul’s blog, it has all you need. Real technical hints and strategic or management questions get solved there.

There are tools solving some of our end user adoption challenges. By now the best is harmon.ie. The tight Outlook integration is kind of a first step for many users. They are used to working within the Outlook window and being capable of accessing documents from there is a huge step forward. Check out the videos harmon.ie put on their page. I simply love this kind of marketing. Also they are quite aware in terms of social media. My colleague Stef put out a tweet with our slides mentioning harmon.ie. And he got a retweet by teamharmonie with in minutes. As the rumors about SharePoint vNext are raising it will be a interesting point to see features Microsoft built in terms of Outlook integration. Can’t wait for the public beta, but I think harmon.ie as all other major 3rd party vendors will have a market even with the next SharePoint versions.

All the German content on our homepage makes me think about writing in English or German. But I guess, I’ll stick to English. There are “only” 125 Million people speaking German out there and I think the SharePoint guys within this 125 Million are able to understand my posts too. At least I hope so.

Long time no post. A sentence more than true for this blog. It’s been a while since the last post and yes you are guessing right, some things have changed.

Don’t’ be afraid I’m still in the whole SharePoint space, actually I think I’m more connected to the product than any time before. At our company we did some great progress in the field and are now a team of about 25 with four Microsoft Gold Competences. Three of them relate to SharePoint and the other one to Lync. At this point I want to shout out a big Thank You to all my colleagues and friends at Solvion. I think we’ve created an creative and engaging environment that suits us perfect and our team spirit is protecting us from misunderstandings and huge conflicts. Also I still consider my work to be fun first and job afterwards. Ad multos annos.

At the time of my last post I guess I was working the most time within Visual Studio. Probably producing code my colleagues had to rewrite as a whole again every now and then. That changed some how. I think I never opened VS in 2012, so no more code for me. As the new quality of code shows a wise decision. My day to day routine changed to project management, facilitating workshops and getting some work done in the pre sales area. By today we are using Scrum as our development method and innovation games to make our workshops more interesting. We have two certified Scrum Masters and two certified Innovation Games facilitators now. So we really invested in learning something new and also took the chance to learn from some experienced guys in each field. Getting the certificate of some field is a nice thing, but way more important than that is the time spent with the smart guys in such a course. You can ask real world questions and they get answered by real world experience. And you get some days off, focusing only on the new techniques and mind sets.

Reading my old posts I can feel the pride I had back then, showing some of our cool work. By now we have 15 SharePoint extensions, three Lync extensions, a product called “Customer Service Desk” and a product called “Contract Management” in our portfolio. You can check out some of our work in a short video here.

I really hope I’ll start posting now on a regular basis. But as one last thing in this second “you are welcome” post of this blog I want to say thank you to Andrew from 21Apps. I got the chance to met Andrew in person at SharePoint Conference Slovenia 2009. His commitment to SharePoint impressed me and changed my mind set. Looking back on the things we did over here, scrum and innovation games for example you can really see what a big influence he had. Also I like his tweets. Topics: SharePoint and football, how much better it can get? Thank you Andrew!

Next post will be about the SharePoint Conference Vienna last week. Solvion had five guys speaking there including my colleague Stefan Hager and myself with a session called “Boost your SharePoint”.

I would like to close this post with some famous words from a big Austrian who grew up in the same town I’m living and working by today … “I’ll be back!”