Tuesday 3rd February saw author Michael Sampson (pictured, right) in Sydney to present the principles of his new book, Seamless Teamwork: Using Microsoft SharePoint technologies to collaborate, innovate and drive business in new ways.
The Sydney session was an exclusive event for members of the Intranet Leadership Forum (ILF) and followed the same session held for Melbourne ILF members on Monday.
SharePoint is finding its way into many a corporate environment, offering a vast array of features and options that organisations and individuals can put to good use. Michael's book and companion presentation focuses on how to make the most of the software "out of the box", without significant additonal coding.
Using a fictional case study, Michael outlined how a project team can use a suite of collaborative tools to communicate effectively and manage work as a virtual team, with project members scattered across the world. It was a great look at how a team can use news alerts, shared spaces, wikis, shared documents, blogs and RSS as a more sophisticated replacement for more traditional tools such as email.
For several ILF members this was the first opportunity to discuss both the software and the underlying collaborative working methods. It proved a highly interesting session, not just for the group to hear some the best sections of an excellent book, but also throw questions at Michael and discuss ideas and the status of collaborative software in a wide range of organisations present (from financial services to local councils, non-profits and private sector organisations).
James has already written a full review of Seamless Teamwork, and you can find more information over at Michael's site, and a link to Amazon can also
be found so you can buy the book.
Slides from this presentation are also available here - free to ILF members who attended in either Sydney or Melbourne (contact Catherine at the ILF for the discount code) or $49.00 to non-members.
If you're looking at SharePoint or any other collaborative tools, I recommend you research it thoroughly and read up with top-level information such as this. (Also check out out a range of collaboration articles and tips on the Step Two Designs website.)
Disclaimer: Step Two is a vendor-neutral consultancy. We don't align ourselves with any CMS vendors. The software above is mentioned purely in context of the book, Seamless Teamwork, written by Michael Sampson.
