Workshop Review: Create an End User Adoption Strategy, Presented by Erica Toelle

  Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars, Reviewed by Bjørn Furuknap at the European SharePoint Conference

I’m normally not particularly fond of attending business user oriented sessions. The topic doesn’t interest me too much and it’s usually too much death-by-PowerPoint. I made an exception, though, because it’s the first chance I’ve had to watch Erica present.

Erica did have PowerPoint only, but she managed to make them interesting and informative by having a clear pattern to how she organized her slides and making it very clear what the various concepts were right from the start. Further, rather than simply reading the slides, she explained their meaning and gave practical examples of how to implement the practices taught.

On a slightly negative note, although I appreciate the need to cover lots of material, I think the pace was a bit quick and Erica was talking really fast. I tried to keep up with live tweets, and noticed that by the time I had completed a 140 character tweet, Erica had already moved far along into the next section and I had to catch up quickly to not miss anything.

Further, and since the slides were very important in the presentation, I’d like to see less content on the slides. Some of the slides were completely illegible, and other still hard to read, even while sitting at the front row. Dividing content into multiple slides would have made it easier to see what was going on.

Overall, though, it was a great presentation and I hope to see Erica present again.

Microsoft messaging rating: There was none.

More from Erica:

• SharePoint Saturday Portland, Oregon, April 20th. Session: "Create an End User Adoption Strategy"
• Document Strategy forum, Greenwich, CT on May 1st. Sessions: "Create an End User Adoption Strategy" & "SharePoint 2010: ECM for the Masses"

Visit http://ericatoelle.com/ to get in touch with Erica and to read her blog.

Other Reviews from the ESPC 2013

• ESPC 2013 Event Review

Speaker / Session Reviews:

• SharePoint 2013 Workshop for Developers, Presented by Sahil Malik
• Achieving the Application Lifecycle Management Dream in SharePoint, Presented by Jeremy Thake and Randy Williams
• Patterns in Apps for SharePoint Store, Presented by Sonja Madsen
• What’s New in SharePoint Designer 2013, Presented by Mai Omar Desouki
• Workflow Stages Done Well, Presented by Mike Fitzmaurice

Author: Bjørn FuruknapWebsite: http://blog.furuknap.net/author/furuknap

Bjørn is a SharePointaholic, spending much of his time with exploring and teaching SharePoint. In addition, he works as a consultant, doing SharePoint development and solutions architecture.