This year I have been to the Intrateam event in Denmark and Intra.Net Reloaded in Berlin. Coming up I will be at the Intranatverk event in Göteberg in late May. This is not the only intranet conference in Sweden, and there is also a good event in Norway in June. France has a very good intranet conference in March and there are smaller intranet events in most EU countries. Often there are speakers from the UK at these events. Four of the Intra.Net Reloaded papers were from UK-based organisations, all of them very good ones and of general interest to any group of intranet managers.
So why are there no intranet events in the UK?
For sure there is the Interaction Intranet event in October but this event is primarily a meeting of customers of Interact Intranet. This somewhat restricts user presentations talking about other CMS products even though the event is very well organised. Apart from this event I am not aware of any other ‘intranet only’ event. Given that there must be thousands of intranets in the UK and hundreds of people with intranet responsibilities I would have expected there to be at least one conference a year, if not more given the scale of some UK cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and others. The population of Greater Manchester is almost one third of the total population of Sweden, which usually has three intranet events each year.
If any conference company reads this blog and sees the scale of the opportunity then let’s talk, and find a way of getting UK intranet managers to talk about their successes and challenges for the benefit of the European intranet community. After all it’s probably cheaper to fly to the UK from the rest of Europe than buy a train ticket to any major UK city!
Martin White