8:00 a.m.
Registration & Continental Breakfast

8:30 a.m.
Chairperson's Welcome, Opening Remarks & Presentation: Debunking SharePoint For Intranets And Portals: Tales From
The Front

Today’s intranets and enterprise portals are streamlining business processes and enriching communication and collaboration throughout the organization. Using Microsoft SharePoint, which has become the defacto solution for the Fortune 500, is the technical platform of choice.

The challenge most companies face now is how to create an intranet that is truly used and effective, how best to leverage SharePoint, and where to start.
 
Michael will share his experiences, honed over 15+ years of working on intranet and portal projects, including the last 10 specifically with SharePoint.  As a long-time Microsoft Partner he will discuss the latest innovations in SharePoint 2010 and what is on the horizon for SharePoint.

Michael Rudnick, Global Practice Leader, Intranets, Portals and Collaboration
TOWERS WATSON

9:30 a.m.

The Evolution Of An Intranet: A 40,000-Foot View Of How To Reach Your Employees

Southwest Airlines is the United States’ most successful low-fare, high frequency, point-to-point air carrier.  Operating more than 3,500 flights a day coast-to-coast, Southwest is the largest U.S. carrier based on domestic passengers carried.  Their mission is dedication to the highest quality of customer service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and company spirit.

In order to deliver quality service to their customers, their employees must be engaged and informed ambassadors.  Southwest’s goal is to provide their employees with the tools and information they need to do their job efficiently, to share their culture, and to support each other and their community via their intranet, SWALife.  As their CEO says, the employees at Southwest Airlines are their single greatest strength and most enduring long-term competitive advantage.

In this session, you will learn from Southwest Airlines, how your organization can also keep employees engaged and supported to do their best.

Learn how Southwest’s intranet strategy and reach has evolved to support that mission, including:

• How they moved from dozens of disjointed web sites to one (SWALife), and how they keep the site cohesive and consistent
• Lessons learned from the launch of two-way communication, with the introduction of an employee blog and featured video content
• Where SWALife fits with their other internal communication channels (IBM’s Websphere Portal for their Intranet and Documentum Web Publisher for their content management system), including their Mobile app and Digital Signs
• Current efforts to integrate AirTran employees into the Southwest Family

Emily Cole, Senior Analyst
Southwest Airlines

10:15 a.m.

Break-Out Blitz! Network And Discuss Your Intranet 2.0 Challenges With Your Fellow Conference Attendees

This session will open the conversation by connecting you with other conference participants and gain greater understanding into many similar issues, concerns, and challenges that your peers are also facing. Become acquainted with your fellow conference attendees in this fun and fast-paced forum!

11:15 a.m.

How To Create A More Effective Intranet To Keep Your Employees Better Informed

Allsup is a nationwide provider of Social Security disability and Medicare services for individuals, employers and insurance carriers. Founded in 1984, Allsup delivers specialized services supporting people with disabilities and seniors so they may lead lives that are as financially secure and as healthy as possible.

As Allsup continues to experience substantial growth year after year, effectively communicating with all employees via the intranet has become very challenging. The company’s communication needs are outpacing the intranet’s ability to provide information to employees in an effective way. It was time to make some major changes to their intranet intranet (they are currently using Dreamweaver) to keep employees better informed.

During this session, you will learn tips on how to create a more effective intranet, including:

• Ways to find out what your employees really want out of the company intranet
• Who should be involved in changing your company’s intranet
• How to overcome roadblocks and opposition to new ideas

Kelly Wisness, Web Content Manager
Allsup
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kwisness

12:00 p.m.
Lunch On Your Own -- But Not Alone!

Join a group of your colleagues for lunch with an informal discussion based on an intranet hot topic. Take this opportunity to join others in a small, interactive group setting to network and brainstorm solutions to your most pressing Intranet 2.0 concerns.

1:30 p.m.

Building Buzz: How To Create A Comprehensive Social Intranet That Allows Employees To Connect With Each Other And With Information Faster And More Efficiently

Around the world, The McGraw-Hill Companies is a leading global financial information and education company. In 2011, McGraw-Hill redesigned its Intranet and introduced Buzz, an internal social network that became the intranet homepage for all 26,000 employees and consultants. It was becoming increasingly important to transcend the traditional barriers of organizational charts, departments and geography to connect employees with each other to operate smarter, faster and better. That challenge prompted a team of communicators, human resources professionals and developers to start a project to introduce a comprehensive internal social solution that leveraged blogging, wikis and groups. The goal was to ignite collaboration, crowdsourcing, innovation and enhanced productivity.

This presentation will detail the journey from creation, to pilot and launch of Buzz providing you with the necessary knowledge and tools used to shift internal communication to a social framework, including:

• Selling the Solution – How to gain buy-in from senior executives
• Gaining Viral Adoption – How 300 invited members can grew to 2,500 users without any formal communication
• Working with Compliance and Legal – How to work with your legal and compliance department to gain their approval
• Driving Broad Adoption and Usage – How to use a variety of methods and approaches from internal ads to working with individual departments to drive adoption for all employees

Edward Ford, Enterprise Community Manager
THE MCGRAW-HILL COMPANIES

2:45 p.m.

Making The Case For Intranet 2.0: How To Successfully Leverage Social Media In Your Intranet, Get Stakeholders On Board, And Stay Within Regulatory Requirements

You may intuitively know internal social media tools would help your organizations’ employees work faster and better. But if you can’t make your case to the people who matter, your project may be doomed before you begin.

American Family Insurance, a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Madison, WI, introduced secure, corporately-administered social media tools to its corporate intranet for their 18,000 employees and sales force in 2010. Despite some initial concerns, these tools (SharePoint 2010, TeamSite and NewsGator) have been well-received and have contributed to a more collaborative, engaged workforce.
 
This session will teach you how to:

1. Get stakeholders on board -- from executives to coders
2. Meet legal and regulatory requirements while still being open and transparent
3. Address concerns and roadblocks with reasonable solutions

Pat Miller, Corporate Publications Manager
American Family Insurance
@PatZMiller

David Soderna, SharePoint Solution Architect
POINTBRIDGE
@dsoderna

3:30 p.m.

Using Your Intranet To Inform And Engage A Global Workforce

In 2008, the Associated Press (AP) implemented its first intranet portal consolidating over 100 disparate sites from across the organization.  The intranet successfully created a personalized employee resource for benefits, company news and departmental information -- accessible by staff in more than 240 locations worldwide.

U.S. adoption of the intranet was immediate and engagement with employee contribution from the states was tremendous. However, outside the U.S., adoption was slow on the uptake. 

Learn lessons from the AP on how you can also garner increased engagement in your workforce and business units, including how to:

• Open the channels for engagement
• Turn feedback into solutions
• Tie introduction of communication channels to business priorities
• Measure results
• Keep the momentum going

Christine Flores, Digital Communications Manager
The Associated Press

4:15 p.m.

Tools, Tactics And Techniques: Understand The Tools Of The Trade And Learn How To Implement Them Into Your Intranet 2.0 Strategy

Are you wondering what Intranet 2.0 tools are out there and how to implement them? Is your organization risk averse or slow to implement new technologies or simply enhance the company intranet? This panel will wrap up the first day answering your questions on how various Intranet 2.0 tools are used in the enterprise.  Hear the stats on which Intranet 2.0 tools are presently being used (61% of enterprises have at least one intranet 2.0 tool, with blogs, discussion groups and instant messaging being the most popular), and find out what many companies continue to struggle with.  Discussions will also cover the following technologies such as SharePoint, Blogger, Drupal, MediaWiki and Wordpress.

• Choosing an open or closed source system
• Evaluating criteria for your system
• Diving into the process for evaluation and implementation
• Balancing user-focused design with IT requirements
• Improving the user experience

Nick Inglis, SharePoint
Program Manager, Global Education Services
AIIM
@nickinglis

Carmine Porco, General Manager & Vice President
PRESCIENT DIGITAL MEDIA
@carmineporco

Marcy Lehman, Managing Consultant
THE ROC GROUP

5:20 p.m.

Networking Reception: Please Join Us!

We invite you to join us for a drink as you relax with your peers. All conference attendees and speakers are welcome to join us for this special opportunity to continue networking. Don't miss this chance to benchmark new ideas over complimentary drinks!

Sign up during the day for dinner with a group. Take advantage of New York City’s fine dining while you continue to network with your colleagues.