Presenting at the Southeast Asia SharePoint Conference: Experiences with two AsiaPacific-wide SharePoint Deployments

I will be presenting at the upcoming Southeast Asia SharePoint Conference (26/27 October 2010) here in Singapore.

Here are the details of my session:

Stories from the field – Experiences with two AsiaPacific-wide SharePoint Deployments

A SharePoint implementation with a scope targeting multiple countries comes with several challenges. Various cultural differences and technological barriers have to be considered for a successful rollout.

These include factors like different management styles and working cultures, multiple languages ("can my SharePoint be in Chinese?"), distributed locations ("can we have a local server here?"), varying connection speeds ("our SharePoint is too slow!"), and others.

In this session, experiences from two SharePoint deployments in the region Asia Pacific will be discussed.

Consider the following situation:

   Your company is rolling out SharePoint, and you have subsidiaries in multiple countries. This means that your users are spread across different locations, sometimes even time zones, and speak different languages. While your company might have a standard language to communicate with other people (English, usually), your colleagues speak a mix of different languages (Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Bengal, French, …), some even only their local language. So when you implement SharePoint, you have to keep in mind that the visitors to your sites might not be able to understand your contents, or that your contents are targeted at a smaller group of people (e.g. only the colleagues in the Paris office) and thus your site has to be in that language.

Considering different cultures is very important as well. The way people in China deal with problems can be very different from the way Americans do it. Project members in India may handle tasks in a very different way than you expected it, and your meetings with members of a business unit in Japan turns not out to be as you imagined. These are just some ways that local cultures can influence your SharePoint deployment.

In addition to that, depending on your network infrastructure and how your offices are dispersed geographically, you need to consider solutions (more servers? faster network? caching?) to make access for employees in these locations more convenient.

I will talk about these topics as well as a few more in my session.
See you there!