Mint Management Technologies, "Mint", recently participated in the Second Annual SHARE Conference, held at The Sandton Sun on 11, 12 and 13 March. Not only did Mint participate as an exhibitor, but also as a track guest speaker, together with a representative of Nedbank Retail, and as a partner sponsor.
"SHARE 13 is The SharePoint Conference for business users and is seen as the platform for the local SharePoint community to collaborate and engage across a series of sessions and workshops," said Francois Pienaar, Services Director at Mint.
"The idea behind SHARE is to learn about trends and experiences across various aspects of Microsoft SharePoint and to network with others in the SharePoint community," added Pienaar.
Pienaar presented on the second day of the conference, together with Nadene Brokensha, Business Head of CRM at Nedbank Retail.
Pienaar said it is critical for Mint to continuously engage with customers to forge a long-term business relationship. "At Mint we focus on building a technology road-map with our customers and engage with as many areas of the business as possible to ensure that the business challenges are addressed. We decided to share our SharePoint journey with the other delegates, and what better way to do so - by combining both sides of the story from vendor and customer points of view."
"Nedbank Retail's centralised leads management strategy encompasses a number of systems, including SharePoint, Microsoft CRM, internal banking systems and other Nedbank Proprietary applications, all with the aim of managing millions of leads which are processed monthly. It is imperative that our staff have the same view of the data, regardless of where in our business they are situated," adds Brokensha.
The joint presentation from Pienaar and Brokensha, titled: 'The Final Frontier: Enable Decision Making at Nedbank Retail by Surfacing Line of Business Data via SharePoint', covered the process undertaken to move closer to the proverbial "North Star" by deploying the core SharePoint infrastructure and enabling various point solutions.
"A key of this process is to manage stakeholders, governance and practical implementation cycles to enable continuous business value. Getting the environment ready for the inevitable upgrade of the current environment to SharePoint 2013, which is on the horizon, walking delegates through the life cycle of an environment which has grown from fledgling to a fully-formed collaboration and information sharing platform, provided Mint and Nedbank Retail with the perfect opportunity to showcase both parties' prowess in implementing an awesome, world-class business solution," said Brokensha.
"Being able to demonstrate to the SharePoint community the practicalities of selecting and then introducing a new solution, preparing the road for an upgrade and sharing lessons learnt provided great value to all," said Pienaar, who is a self-proclaimed SharePoint junkie. The audience targeted through the event is unique in that actual business users, together with the usual IT technical specialists, attend the sessions and have the opportunity to engage with vendors, such as Mint, and are presented with the opportunity to pose their specific questions to the teams manning the exhibition booths.
"Mint engages with customers across numerous aspects of introducing, implementing and continuously improving their collaboration portals, whether internally focused (intranets), or customer-facing (Web sites)," said Pienaar.
SHARE is a world-class event from all angles, whether you are a delegate, exhibitor or speaker. These topics as well as interactive workshops, exhibition booths and the powerful keynote presentations provided a full 360-degree view of the current scenarios as well as what's to come.
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