Author - Phil Duffy, Clayko SharePoint Architect

Several of the Clayko team from the Perth and Sydney offices attended the Australian SharePoint 2010 Conference(AUSPC), which was held at the Hilton, Sydney over June 16 and 17. It was a very good event for technical and business users interested in everything SharePoint and related technologies. The event was very well planned and some of the best food I've had at an event, especially the afternoon treats.

Presentations

There were four presentation tracks and a lot of SharePoint experts presenting from all over the world (including the keynote from Arpan Shah):

• VOC - Voice of the customer, presenting real-world case studies
• Business Track (concentrating on the end user of features) - the best track overall I think for the overview of features that will provide the most impact to the people who use SharePoint everyday (but then I am biased!)
• Technical 1 and 2 - based on the code level or more in-depth technical review

A couple of us (myself and Clayton Dorrington) from Clayko also presented on day two of the conference based around a customer case study (Community Mutual Group) and how we helped design, plan and implement a document management solution based on SharePoint and KnowledgeLake.

Designing and Planning a SharePoint Solution

One of the topics we concentrated on in our presentation was using content-types, which is not just relevant to a document management focussed implementation of SharePoint, but also useful for the scanning projects we work on to categorise and re-use the key metadata and document types.

There were some useful related presentations around the Information Architecture and Design aspects of a SharePoint project which I feel is still one of the most underplanned and least understood areas which can greatly benefit a project and increase end-user uptake.

Summary

All told a very useful couple of days and with the introduction of SharePoint 2010 and increased uptake across the industry I'm sure next year should be even better. So would recommend anyone currently using or thinking of SharePoint to take a serious look at.