I am thrilled and honoured to be invited to present two sessions at the SEF Unity Connect conference in Stockholm on Oct. 26-28, 2016. This will be my first trip to Europe and I am really looking forward to visiting Sweden and meeting new friends.
This is a fantastic opportunity for me to share my knowledge and experience with others in the European SharePoint/O365 community as well as learn from an impressive lineup of notable speakers, many whom I’ve only met through social media.
If you’re going to be there please find me and say hi. It would be great to meet in person. Click here to register for the event.
I am presenting 2 sessions:
Information Architecture End-to-End
Why is Information Architecture (IA) so important? In this session I explain what IA means within the context of SharePoint. I will demo a complete end-to-end example to illustrate how numerous IA components can work together to build a seamless, user-friendly, organized and compliant solution for document management. I will build the site columns and content types, enable and configure some site features to organize the content and set up policies to meet regulatory requirements. I will then demonstrate how customized search webparts can show this content to users – one of the many benefits of having a well-planned IA in a SharePoint environment.
.
How to Build a Search-driven SharePoint Site
What does it mean to build a search-driven website in SharePoint and why is this better than the traditional approach of site design? In this session you will learn the value-add of this design architecture and how to build search-driven sites in SharePoint using cross-site publishing features. This approach not only improves the experience for content authors but also provides dynamic, tailored pages for content consumers, all done by leveraging SharePoint search and managed metadata as the underlying mechanism. I’ll walk thru an end-to-end example of designing, authoring and publishing content as well as customizing search webparts to demonstrate how you can use this technique to keep your site dynamic and personalized.
I hope to see you there!
[UPDATE] Oct. 28, 2016 – I had a fantastic time at the conference. The organizers, Goran Husman and team, did a fantastic job and the conference was first-class. It was a well-organized event in everything from the venue and hotel to the food, music and SharePints.
I really enjoyed presenting my 2 sessions. I had some questions and follow-up after and loved that the audience appreciated my fun Canada-Sweden comparisons! 🙂
- Link to the Search-Driven presentation is here.
- Link to the Information Architecture presentation is here

I also enjoyed getting to know some of the speakers at after-hours events. It was a pleasure to meet many people I previously only knew thru social media.


I met so many people throughout the week. Here are some of my new Swedish and Norwegian friends…

It was a fantastic week and a well-run conference. Thanks to Goran Husman (@GHusman) for the invitation and the warm welcome he extended. One day I hope to make it back to Sweden.

-JCK