2 Days of Gamification and Productivity in Denver

It has been a long time since I’ve walked beyond the walls of the Denver airport (last time, I was in my mid-20’s), and I believe that this trip was my first time I’ve ever actually been downtown. As for the event – this was my second time participating in a SharePointFest conference, my last one taking place in Chicago back in 2011. Great crowd, lots of good discussion and interaction inside my sessions and out in the exhibit area, and a lot of interest around my topics of gamification and improving end user productivity.

In my first session, entitled Productivity, Gamification, and SharePoint 2013, I shared ideas, case studies, and examples of many of the new social features in SharePoint 2013, also mentioning some of the features available in SharePoint 2010 and through the partner ecosystem, and how these features can help teams confront the end user adoption issues that most organizations are experiencing with their SharePoint deployments, regardless of version.

For those unfamiliar with the topic, gamification is the strategy of using games, rewards, and other tools to make your system more engaging, creating addictive experiences that encourage and motivate end users to participate more frequently, and to delve more deeply into the system.

You can see my slides on SlideShare or through the viewer below:

In my second session, entitled The Four Facets of SharePoint Productivity, I touched on some similar themes to my earlier session, but instead of a simple outline of the available features, my presentation went more deeply into “Why” organizations should spend more time, resources, and effort in focusing specifically on productivity issues – spending a goo portion of my time on the business value of social.

My slides are here and below:

With the recent news out of Microsoft about the roadmap and initial integrations between SharePoint and Yammer, I added 3 slides into my second presentation with mockups of how these integrations will look…..and I’m including them here (all of which star Mr. Noah Sparks, who you can find at @noahsparks).

Essentially, within the on prem version of SharPoint 2013, you have the option of replacing the newsfeed with your Yammer newsfeed (for the paid version of Yammer). I’m going to write a separate post on the topic, but this is an option – not a must need. There are reasons for switching your newsfeed now, and holding off until further integrations are available. Understand your business needs.

Within a team site, you can replace or have the Yammer newsfeed side-by-side with your team site newsfeed. Again, I don’t recommend replacing, but side-by-side would be a great value add if you have both on prem and are also using Yammer.

Finally, the navigation in Office 365 is being modified to include a link to Yammer. Yammer is becoming the primary newsfeed in O365, but you have the ability to switch back and forth between O365 and Yammer through a streamlined navigation, so it won’t pop open a separate window with a different interface. This is a great integration for all of us using both.

More content to come out soon. I need to run to a lunch session here at the Heartland Region SharePoint Conference taking place in Columbus Ohio (#iccspc), but will be posting again later today or tonight on this topic.