It gets more evident than ever at this year’s ESPC that there’s a paradigm shift taking place in the SharePoint world, towards a people centered outlook. Keynote after keynote proclaim that “SharePoint does not matter, people matter”.

Stretching this message even further, and giving the audience some clues towards the root foundation of successful collaboration, MVP Samuel Zuercher shared with us his experience-based discoveries in the breakout session “The Natural Law of Collaboration – Where does Collaboration start?”.

Samuel, who has been working with on technical side of SharePoint for more than a decade, revealed that sometime ago he woke up at 3 am with a breaking sweat and decided there and then to find out the true root issues for SharePoint not delivering on its value promises. This was something that has been bugging him for years and was a repeated pattern at many of his client organizations. And Samuel’s reflections on the shadow side of the human condition, and on our upsides too, gave us some more pieces for being able to help our customers lay the jigsaw of the Social Enterprise.

In summary, good relationships create good collaboration and good collaboration creates good actions. For good relationships to breed each team member need to start cleaning up their own backyard before they go knocking on their neighbor’s door. Having such deep knowledge into collaborative software + his insights into the workings of us humans, Samuel promises to be a social social influencer on the future of collaboration.

The panel debate lead by Christian Buckley on “How to Track, Measure, and Get Business Value Out of Social Influence” was another example on the people focus and thanks to Christian as a facilitator the audience got some interesting personal reflections from the invited experts. And Edin Kapić was able to bring the   discussion with him into his breakout session “Social Business Value Demystified: Real-World Experiences” and explain the real challenges with meauring social value. The audience got some keys for the necessity of mixing qualitative and quantitative indicators for real social value measurements.

With this paradigm shift in mind tomorrow’s keynote by data scientist Rafal Lukawiecki, “Attractive & Collaborative Business Intelligence with Microsoft Power BI and SharePoint” will be very interesting to listen to. How people centered are the latest Business Intelligence tools from Microsoft? Will it, for example, be possible to have a seamless integration of Yammer with the BI tools of SharePoint (dashboards, KPI:s, etc.) for people to be able to collaborate and communicate around the important business information? When that integration is in place, Collaborative BI will really will take off.