I was lucky enough to attend the SharePoint 2009 conference in Las Vegas last week. I met some great people and was thoroughly impressed with the innovation from Microsoft and from their clients alike.

On the plus side

• Great new functionality in SharePoint 2010 which I’m going to enjoy bringing to the company. Especially the social computing aspects
• Top innovation from companies, particular Electronic Arts (EA) and Accenture.
• Great people
• Organisation at the Mandalay. I think that team had it really organised. Whilst some would have seen the mealtimes as chaotic (and on day 1 it certainly was), I think they did a sterling job
• Kirk Patrick, Mandalay Bay staff. Despite Pepsi being everywhere, he was unphased by my request for a range of Coke products to be delivered within the hour to our conference room. There in 10. Brilliant.

Downsides

• Las Vegas. If you’re not a gambling person like me, it’s a thoroughly depressing town and if you are a gambler, there’s a chance you were more depressed about it than me. One colleague lost over $1000 – it’s hard to be happy for him
• Coffee. Some are addicted to caffeine. Some, like me, were 8 hours out of their timezone and needed the fix to get ‘em through. There were water stations galore, more food than needed so the lack of coffee stations seemed an oversight. (Edit – I think they noticed by Thursday judging by the coffee points near registration)
• SharePoint accessibility coding. I recognise the advances they’ve made but this is a very complex area. The recognition of standards is a genuinely positive step, but when each country appears to have their own, it seems unlikely that a single MS standard will work for all geographies. You know, great for the US, but probably not so good for the rest of the world.

I really hope that anyone who came to see me speak last Wednesday enjoyed the session and has been generous in their feedback. I’d be more than happy to answer any questions about our deployment if you have them.

I also hope that next year, SPC10 is not in Las Vegas. Seattle maybe, New York even. Either way, look forward to it.

Yesterday was another auspicious day for our work intranet as at 06:00 EDT, we launched the new HR portal section bringing self-service tools to our employees.

Culturally, it’s a major change. We’ve shifted from a traditional HR model (providing local HR experts aligned to functional teams) to a centralised support model with aligned self-service intranet facilities.

The intranet aspect of this launch has been an major undertaking. It has seen us switch from a simple simple SharePoint iteration to a multi-variation model to manage the various language options across our geographies (US English, US Spanish, Canadian French, Canadian English, UK English, French, Belgian French, Belgian Dutch and Dutch).

A few facts to share:

• Switch from 1 to 9 SharePoint variations
• New menus to accommodate HR content
• 2000+ pages of multi-lingual content
• 12 Integrated SAP HR transactions
• New “MyLinks” section to enable web bookmarking
• Integrated employee benefits functions
• Integrated job search functions
• New “workbench” page
• Enhanced employee profile page

This new launch is a major piece of work and a huge step change for our intranet which, up until now, has largely been a communication and collaboration vehicle. As good as that content was, our employees had no “compulsion to visit”, meaning the site was mostly for browsing rather than for action.

Bringing transactions to the portal adds that employee “compulsion to visit” which will have knock on value for the news articles and executive communications. In the long run, I hope that our employees will that the ease of information access and flexibility of use will outweigh the negatives of not having an HR expert immediately to hand — but only time will tell.

Tomorrow I’ll share some of the initial feedback

In the early 1980s, a Russian governmental delegation came to London to talk to their counterparts and understand more about the capitalist system. One asked “Which minister is in charge of making sure there’s enough bread for the people?” and was dumbfounded with the response that no-one was. The opportunity to make a little dough (pun intended) was the mechanism for ensuring there was sufficient bread with 1000s of unrelated but interconnected parts bringing fertiliser to field, wheat to mill, flour to baker, bread to shop. It’s remarkable that it all works really, given the lack of orchestration.

Step forward 30 years. Who is it that ensures that the right wiki pages exist, or that they are accurate? Who regulates the blogs to ensure fairness in all aspects or that each youTube video has a reply? I sincerely hope the answer is no one individual — the answer is the collective community of users.

The free market world of social computing has already created marvellous resources such as wikipedia, youTube, millions of blogs and billions of tweets – countless petabytes of information of various levels of worthiness. All this we can pass on to others. All this knowledge nucleating from the provision of social computing tools. Like the scientists at the coffee break, all that was needed was the forums and then the creativity flowed.

But what I’m really excited about is the power of social computing behind the firewall on the corporate intranet. Here, we have the same community already used to interacting digitally (after all, employees are real people too!) But added to the collaborative confusion on the internet, is a genuine common purpose and a little orchestration from management. This could give the fledging knowledge sources some direction and speed up creation and usage.

Does a little orchestration of social computing outputs kill or strengthen it’s power? Is the free and open approach to knowledge creation the best way or does it need some rules.

I’ve really got into Twitter of late and am gathering a select group of followers. I find it useful place to vent, a useful place to network, to laugh and to learn. As an aside, much of the research into a forthcoming keynote speech I’m giving was found on the internet via Twitter.

For all that eulogising, I think it’s the functionality of twitter that I like as the interface on their own website is far from fully formed. To that end, I’ve been using a bunch of applications which interface back, including Tweetdeck, Lounge, Twitterfon and others. Tweetdeck, especially with their latest 0.25 update, is the pick by some way.

But dear reader, all is not well. My Macbook is well armed with 2GB of RAM and has a spritely processor, but Tweetdeck hogs capacity. It mostly hovers around 8-10% of my CPU (still way over the odds if you ask me) but will often spike into the 90s and higher bringing everything else to its knees. Close it down, reload and all is well for a while again.

Anyone else having the same issues?

I’ve been using Twitter for over a year, but only actively for the last month or so. One thing I did recently was to have iTunes twitter my listening habits to my account which appears to have piqued some collective interest judging by the number of messages I get about it. Let me show you how.

To do this you will need: iTunes, a last.fm account with scrobbling, a Twitter account (obviously!) and an OpenID account such as Google Mail.

1. Go to last.fm and set up a new account if you don’t have one. This is all free and brilliant — frankly, you need one anyway! Download the last.fm software — this will ‘listen’ to whatever you play on iTunes and scrobble it to the last.fm website.
2. Next up, log in to twitterfeed.com using your OpenID. It’s likely that you already have a suitable ID for this site (complete list here). Once logged in, choose Go to my feeds or create a new one. Choose to create a new feed.
3. Final Step! On the form, choose ‘twitter’ from the first dropdown list and enter your twitter details — then ask it to authenticate it. In the RSS feed URL field, enter

   feed://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/XXXX/recenttracks.rss

   where XXXX is your last.fm username. You can change how often you want the feed to appear on twitter on this page too. Don’t do it too often or you’ll upset your followers — once every 2 hours or so seems ok. In the ‘prefix each tweet with’, you might like to enter ‘is listening to ‘ to give your new tweet some context. Then hit the create button.

That’s it, you’re done. Your iTunes listening habits will now appear on twitter and your followers can see what you’re listening too. Great way to get more followers too — it’s remarkable how often I get comments and new followers based on this feed.

Once you’re comfortable with this process, try adding a flickr feed or a feed from your blog.