This is the third article in a series of articles on how the EUSP team coordinated and produced SharePoint Saturday EMEA. The first article walked through the runup to the event. The second article talks about what happened during the event. This article will sum up the final evaluation of the event and what we will do better next time.

 By any criteria I set, I consider SharePoint Saturday EMEA a resounding success! And no, that’s not coming from an objective third party, but what Toni, Isaac and I setup to achieve, providing world wide access by the highest level of SharePoint presenters, reached its objective.

We had over 600 registrations prior to the event, not counting the presenters. From the stats that Toni kept, we had around 200 people participating at any one time during the entire, 9 hour presentation period. There were 20 top quality presentations, with 8 of those coming for MVPs. The audio was solid for most of the presentations, I didn’t get any negative feedback on the video quality, and the AJAX-Chat system held up like a champ.

Room for Improvement

I was really, really happy with what happened, but as with everything, there was room for improvement.

Communication

One of the biggest flaws in the event were the lines of communication between me, the event registrants and the presenters. My intention was to get to within a day or two of the event and do an email blast to give out the login instructions. The problem is that a lot of email programs block, or mark as spam, email that comes through in a bulk bcc.

I think the way around that is to have a page on EUSP with the login instructions. We could even do it directly on the SharePoint Saturday site. Waiting until the day of to post the login was a little scary for a lot of people, since they didn’t know if they were going to be able to access the sessions or not.

Another piece of communication that was lacking was notifying the participants of what was happening during breaks. At the beginning of SPSEMEA, I had not prepared any slides that said “On break… Next Presentation Starts at the Top of the Hour”, or “On Break from 12:00 to 12:50″. Lucky for me, one of the moderators realized that shortcoming and starting inserting break slides into all the channels.

Communication to the participants is critical if we are to encourage them to stay for the duration of such a long event.

For future events, I will provide cut-and-paste session information for each session that we can paste into the chat room channels. This seemed to work well, as I would setup a note with information on which channel (the presenter and the presentation) for the next set of session. Pasting these into each of the chat channels gave participants a chance to start planning what they would like to see in the next hour.

Speaker Prep

Communication with the presenters is even more critical because there is so much room for error: session time based upon GMT -0, what channel, special presenter login location. We were very lucky that there was no major breakdown. I know that we had a few speakers confused about which channel and what time, but out of 20 presentations, we were able to handle mistakes and set it back right.

I waited until the last week to put the presentation schedule together. It would have been easier on the presenters to know further in advance so they could block out their specific time slots.

Even though we offered the presenters an opportunity to test their connection through practices sessions, only 1/2 took advantage of the offer. Next time we do this, I will insist that presenters must run a short, 15 minute practice session with us, since most of the problems of the day had to do with managing the interface of Live Meeting, not with the presentations.

Moderator Prep

 Toni, Isaac and I breathed a HUGE sigh of relief once the event was completed. We were sorely understaffed when trying to run 3 simultaneous channels for 9 hours with only 3 moderators. In order to keep concentration, there needs to be one, central coordinator for the event, but moderators should work in stretches of 4 hours, maximum, before turning the channel over to another moderator.

I also forgot about food! In a live SharePoint Saturday, sponsors provide food and snacks throughout the day. In an online situation, each person has to provide their own. In my case, I only brought a few bananas. Next time, I’m loading up with snacks, energy drinks, bars… anything I can get my hands on before walking out of the house.

Toni and Isaac did an incredible job moderating with only a few minutes of real, hands-on activity with Live Meeting before the event. When I ran the practice sessions with the presenters, Toni jumped in and was playing with all the buttons to see how it worked, so he knew more about it than I did by the end of the sessions.

Setup of the sessions is critical. Live Meeting allows you to upload slidedecks before the event, encoding them so they can appear directly within the Live Meeting platform without need for a local version of PowerPoint. Preloading slides cuts down on the time it takes to get a presentation ready, plus there’s a certain comfort level knowing it’s ready to go before you login.

I present quite a bit so I know how hard it is to get speakers to have their decks ready days before an event. (I’m still working on my SPTechCon decks!) Whatever can be done to encourage presenters to get their decks in before the day of the event will take an emmense strain off the production crew.

Notes from Toni Frankola on Improving the Event

1. We changed channels in last moment. This was a bit confusing for presenters and me during first hour.
2. We should have 15 minutes break between sessions as I did not have enough time to change everything (e.g. post something in chat, twitter etc.)
3. Some sessions were late because of Q&A or late start (due to technical problems)
4. It would be really use full to have live chat inside platform like WebEx
5. Moderators need to prepare a slidedeck announcing next sessions (LM really sucks for just writing text)
6. Moderators should prepare announcements for Twitter and paste them before actual session (including speaker TW user account is available)
7. It would be useful to have two moderators per channel as I so little time to visit toilets.
8. It would be nice to have a Twitter person per channel (if there are two moderators that this is covered)
9. Some presenters haven’t tested the platform so they did not know how to share desktop, how to change slides and continued to make mistakes. I had a presenter that I had to remind every few minutes to change a slide etc.
10. We need to instruct presenters not to animate slides as these do not look very well.
11. We need to have evaluations for each sessions afterwards (there is LM feature)
12. Maybe we could have some prizes at the end if we could track attendance somehow.

Where to Go From Here

SharePoint Saturday EMEA is in the books! It was a successful event, but there are definitely things to be improved upon. People are already asking “When’s the next one?”

I’d like to start planning another one for June called “Follow the Sun: A Day in the Life of SharePoint“, where we start at 10:00am in New Zealand and follow the sun around the globe for the next 24 hours, sponsoring presentations by people within their time zone. That’s 24 hours, 3 to 5 presentations per hour, all day.  It will be on a work day, none of this weekend stuff.

An event of this type will need global support. Toni said he’s in… what about you?

Thanks for reading. Thanks for participating.

Regards,
Mark Miller
Founder and Editor
EndUserSharePoint.com