The EMEA Road Trip Comes to an End

This weekend closes out my extended road trip of the Middle East and Europe, wrapping up a 23-day whirlwind tour that started with a SharePoint Saturday event in Tampa (#SPSTampa) and now wraps up with a SharePoint Saturday event in Minneapolis (Twin Cities, or #SPSTC). In between these US events, I was able to visit customers, partners, and communities in Dubai in UAE, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in Israel, Stockholm Sweden, Berlin and Munich in Germany, Helsinki Finland, London in the UK, Brussels Belgium, and both Jersey and Guernsey (the latter of which can be seen in the photo above) in the Channel Island (between France and the UK). I am blessed to have a job that allows me to see some incredible places, and spend time with business and technical communities around the world.

With all of the meetings, I think I gave 15 or more separate presentations, talking all about the AIIM.org SharePoint survey results and lessons learned from 2010 deployments, the state of governance in SharePoint projects, productivity improvements in SharePoint 2013, and of course Axceler. While my slides and anecdotes may have been largely the same at each event, the questions and experiences shared by each audience are always unique, and help me to better understand what is happening on the ground. Sure, there are similar themes across most organizations — we’re all working from a common platform, so that’s to be expected — but I do enjoy talking to people about their unique business requirements, and the solutions they’ve developed.

I am looking forward to being home for a few days, and plan to work some lighter hours so that I can reconnect with my family before heading south to Las Vegas for the Big Show. Like many of you planning to attend the SharePoint Conference in a little over a week, I need to go into the tool and complete my profile, figure out which sessions I am going to attend, and make sure I am registered for all of the extracurricular events that happen around SPC. I also have a couple webinars to present this next week, content to write (I’ve been posting once a day for the last couple months, in case you didn’t notice), and materials to review for my team before making the trek to Nevada. Add to that the releases of a couple whitepapers, some press releases, and some videos that I’ve been sitting on for a few weeks, and it’s going to be a busy week.

Thank you to everyone who helped make this EMEA trip possible. Within Axceler, I want to talk Jules Strong and Cat Morgan for pulling it all together, and Perry Gale and the London sales team for helping fill my time with customer and partner meetings. Joining me on the road for a couple legs were Murad, Jamie, Julian and Cat — we had fun, and made some great contacts. I want to thank the teams at Harmon.ie, CloudShare, and Efficens Software for pulling together a very successful event in Tel Aviv, and I look forward to great partnerships going forward. And of course I’d like to thank the folks from the several different SPUGs for inviting me to present, including Michael Greth, Aonghus Fraser, Jussi Mori, Patrick Sledz, and everyone else who helped pull them together.

So with this weekend’s SPS event, it will put me at 14 SharePoint Saturday’s this year, with two more to go: South Florida and UK, both in December. While I am looking forward to this weekend’s event, more than anything I look forward to going home.