Kicking off the Microsoft 2011 SharePoint Conference: Day One Recap

Guest Blog Post by Rich Blank, Solutions Engineer with NewsGator

Sunday, October 2nd kicked off the Microsoft 2011 SharePoint Conference. There was a lot of excitement and buzz throughout the exhibition floor with an incredible showing of SharePoint users, consultants, and vendors during the Sunday night pre-conference. NewsGator's booth (#364) was packed with dozens and dozens of people wanting to learn more about Social Sites. Not only did they stop our booth, but they stayed and waited in line for 10-15 minutes at times just to talk to someone. 

As people stopped by, I noticed one common theme - “social” is hot and everyone is considering it as organizations rethink, redesign, and migrate their intranets and extranets to SharePoint 2010. There were people from defense and government, entertainment, technology, financial services, healthcare and more. Social knows no boundaries and crosses all industry verticals. And the first step for many was simply understanding the possibilities and capabilities that NewsGator Social Sites 2010 adds on top of SharePoint.

Another common theme from Sunday evening was helping people understand the value of social itself. According to the Radicati Group (http://www.radicati.com/), around 294 billion emails are sent each day – that’s 2.8 million emails per second! We are overloaded by an inbox that has become difficult to filter and search for relevant information. We are overscheduled and are all trying to do more with less. Social technology changes how we communicate, how we “push” information to people, collaborate, and locate experts. The activity stream allows users to find information and people that are relevant to them. It puts a collaborative context around that information and an easy way to filter conversations and activities. It allows us to connect with each other no matter where we are in the world bringing transparency and visibility to people, their activities, and their relationships. And most importantly social technology allows us to collaborate from one single place without having to navigate to each community site inside SharePoint or to news and information sources outside of SharePoint. Social technology is indeed a productivity tool for knowledge workers in the 21st century.

I expect the full week of the conference to be packed with stories, learning, knowledge sharing, relationship building, and of course PARTIES! The SharePoint Conference itself is one live social event. It’s great to meet and socialize with some of the NewsGator customers we have worked with over the last several years. Once a year conferences like this allow us to further strengthen relationships, hear customer feedback, and see the excitement and continued interest about what’s coming next! Expect to hear some exciting new announcement from NewsGator during the conference as we continue to integrate, partner, and strengthen our position as a leader in the enterprise social computing world.

PS – Stay tuned tomorrow for our recap of Day Two (Mon, 10/3) at the 2011 SharePoint Conference!