Just a quick post to say that we are now all booked up to go to the SharePoint Conference for Business Users 2013 (20-22 March) in Amsterdam. This is the first time we will be attending a conference that is targeted more towards business users, than technical. We are currently deciding what we are going to do from a marketing perspective in the 2nd half of 2013 and conferences are something we are looking at. This will be a great way to kill 3 birds with one flight.

After all, there’s hard decisions to be made – do we go for SharePoint conferences, if so do we hit the technical ones, or business ones ? Or, do we hit the G-R-C type conferences, where there are lots of professionals that will appreciate what DocRead does, but wont necessarily know anything about SharePoint. Not easy problems to solve and I am not sure there’s one right answer. Maybe we just need to sponsor them all!

This conference does sound quite different from what I have attended before, Jasper Ooosterveld, describes it as “a great opportunity for users to see how other businesses have approached and overcome similar issues in adopting SharePoint”. I don’t think there are going to be any talks about the JQuery at this conference!

Anyway, what else do we want to get out of this conference ?

Learning

There’s not enough hours in the day to keep track with SharePoint. You buy the books, get the videos but you never find time to use them. There’s way too many distractions. There’s nothing like getting out of the office and into a new environment where work isn’t an option. So, one of our priorities is obviously to learn some new things about SharePoint.

Networking

If you read my previous post about running a SharePoint software company, you will know that I strongly believe that networking with both potential customers and also other SharePoint vendors is essential. I really want to meet up with some of my virtual friends, like Jasper Oosterveld and Andre Salomons. If I get a chance, I would also love to chat to some of the speakers from companies such as Walt Disney, Unilever, BNP Paribas and AkzoNobel to see how they are using SharePoint and how they have managed to get their users to adopt SharePoint. (Which I presume they have).

Are you going and would you like to meet up ?

If you are intending to visit the conference – maybe we can meet up, have a beer (and even organize a quick tour around DocRead). We will be there for both of the Wednesday and Thursday evenings, saying in the conference hotel, so drop us a line and it would be awesome to meet up.