Announcing the first Channel Islands SharePoint User Group meeting! 

A few months later than originally planned, I'm pleased to announce that we have two great sessions lined up for Thursday 9th Feb from 17:45 - 20:30 at the Jersey Arts Centre.

There will be food and drink at half-time and of course the obligatory SharePint afterwards!

Session 1: John Timney (SharePoint MVP/Cap Gemini)
SharePoint 2010 Virtualisation remains a hot topic and for many firms it is still as yet unexplored territory and the concepts surrounding virtualisation are pushing the knowledge boundaries for SharePoint Infrastructure Architects, Administrators and Solution Architects into areas they thought they wouldn’t need to understand, away from the physical and into the conceptual. This presentation offers an introductory view of some of the important aspects to consider when thinking about utilizing virtualization in the SharePoint 2010 world and considers reasons for virtualizing SharePoint 2010, supported physical and virtual platform architectures, guidelines for choosing which aspects of farm to virtualize, support and the issues it brings, considers layered designs as an easy means of visualising virtual architecture and introduces conceptual Geo-DR

Session 2: Andrew Woodward (SharePoint MVP/21 Apps) & Ant Clay (21 Apps)
Using Innovation Games® to understand what your users really need from SharePoint
An overview of Innovation Games®, how we feel these techniques can apply to your SharePoint projects AND we'll get to play so you see hands-on the value the techniques can bring. Serious Fun!

Bios:

Andrew Woodward

Andrew Woodward is a developer by heart, with a wealth of experience in mentoring and leading agile teams. He has taken this learning and experience and expanded it with emergent thinking, dialog mapping, and serious games enabling him to really help organizations understand the rationale behind decisions and ask the tough question ‘Why’ and how to measure the benefit. Through his enthusiasm and application Andrew has promoted innovative techniques to the SharePoint community and has been awarded Microsoft MVP award for SharePoint continuously since 2007. He is also founder of 21apps.

Ant Clay

Ant is Chief Strategy Officer at 21app. With over 15 years IT delivery and consulting experience, Ant is one of a new breed of SharePoint 'business consultants' working with clients using visualisations, game-play and organisational storytelling to 'change the way they work' and effectively deliver their organisational vision through SharePoint and Office 365. Ant consults and delivers on a range of topics including facilitating project governance, innovating client's business models, architecting and delivering business aligned technology solutions and a number of innovative training and workshop sessions. He is a regular speaker across Europe on a range of topics including SharePoint & Office 365 governance, the 'Celery Effect', business model innovation, hybrid organisations, social media and aligning technology with the business vision.

John Timney 

John Timney is a Principal Strategy Consultant based in the UK. Much of his interest and day to day work is around Business Impact and Technical Strategies for Collaborative Solutions based on SharePoint, including Architectural Assurance and Governance, Project Management, Service Assurance and Delivery and Accessibility compliance. He is currently employed by Capgemini and is based in the North of England.

With 20 years in IT, he has a lot of experience to draw upon and has architected some of the largest and most influential SharePoint systems currently deployed. John has in the past co-authored a number of books and is active in the Technet forums daily. He also reviews for some of the world's leading book companies and recently co-authored the SharePoint Handbook. He is a veteran Microsoft SharePoint MVP, the North east Co-ordinator and a regular speaker for the Sharepoint User Group in the UK.