I spent much of last week taking part in the IntraTeam Conference in Copenhagen. It was an exceptionally good conference, with excellent speakers, a well-planned programme, stimulating conversations and superb food. What more can you ask? What marks this conference out as being different is that a signficiant number of the delegates were members of the communities of practice that IntraTeam run in Denmark, and so the event was run by a company who really understand the intranet business and who clearly listens to members of the CoPs when developing the conference programme. It is probably the only intranet conference in the world of this scale run by a company that makes its living from intranets, and it showed. 

Kurt Kragh Sorensen, the MD of Intrateam, persuaded a very good team of speakers to come to the event, including Jane McConnell, Howard McQueen, James Robertson,  Toby Ward and me from the consulting business, together with William Amurgis and Don DeHoff (American Electric Power) Richard Dennison (British Telecom) and Allen Huish (British Airways) who run successful intranets. There were parallel tracks in English and Danish, and judging from the attendance at the Danish sessions the speakers here were also obviously highly regarded.

Prior to the conference, which attracted around 170 delegates, there were some well-attended workshops. Howard McQueen and I ran one on intranet best-practice ideas and the level of contribution from the 50 or so delegates was interesting, and at times very challenging. One thing that became very clear during the presentation by Toby Ward on SharePoint that probably around 80% of the attendees were in organisations actively implementing it, even if not for the intranet - yet!

It is very easy for consultants to believe in their own rhetoric! I found that this conference was invaluable in me having to defend my position on certain issues against people who were very competent intranet managers and also colleagues from around the world. This was especially true when acting as the leader of a discussion table on enterprise search! 

This year I was invited to attend by Kurt but having learned so much and been subject to great Danish hospitality it is now one of only four that I would go to even if I was not invited. The others are the Enterprise Search Summit, the J.Boye Aarhus Conference and the Online Information Conference. Next year the conference runs from 2-4 March.

Martin White