SharePoint at Funko one year ago!
I was sitting here this evening, watching this documentary called Making Fun: The Story of Funko… and realized that I hadn’t blogged about my trip to Funko! A little over a year ago, I was lucky to be invited by Microsoft, to work with some other MVPs, onsite at a customer, to help them with their SharePoint implementation. The other MVPs were Susan Hanley and Ben Niaulin, and the customer was FUNKO. Thanks Mark Kashman for bringing it all together!
The project was called “SharePoint Swoop!”. The idea is that we swoop in, go on site, and implement a SharePoint intranet in just 3 days! What a fun challenge! Realistically, an entire intranet isn’t usually completed in 3 days, but we made it manageable, by narrowing it down to some very specific departments to use as examples. Our roles were:
Sue Hanley – “The Strategist”
Me (Laura Rogers) – “Citizen Developer”
Ben Niaulin – “Your Friend in Tech”
This was such a fun, amazing, special project to get to be a part of! Before we went on this trip, we had a few meetings where we chatted about what we would cover realistically, and what our roles would be. They decided to call this show “SharePoint Swoop – the intranet makeover show”. There are five, 6 minute webisodes.
When we first arrived, it was awesome. Their corporate headquarters are very cool! There are giant Pops on the building all around it! They filmed some shots of us as we were walking down the street. That whole process was very interesting and fascinating. We came in from different angles and walked down the street several times. Of course I’ve never been on a show before. There are multiple takes of everything. Even though this is a really small show with only a few 6 minute episodes, this was a real production company (Hullaballo) with a full camera crew, etc.
You can see one of the cameramen in the bottom right of the shot. Here he is again. Fancy gear, huh?
Then, we went into the Funko building for the first time. It is a retail store on the bottom floor, and then the corporate headquarters is on all of the floors above that. That store is amazing. Here are some pictures that I took of some pops and just various parts of the store:
Once we got settled and down to business, we started talking about the intranet itself, and Sue did her thing. We talked to the customer about their current intranet and content, and their goals. My main role in this adventure was to build a PowerApp. I had already decided that their truck transfer form was a good candidate for an app. I also knew that it could potentially be pretty time consuming, and that we were only going to be there for 3 days.
We did end up splitting off into separate rooms, talking to separate groups of people, so that we could each do our roles in this overall project, and then we would all get together a few times a day to film extra scenes like the bowling scene, the scene on the roof, or some where we were having conversations with the customer in conference rooms. We also each got pulled away every now and then for those little side interviews, you know, like they do in reality shows. Here’s a silly selfie of me and Scott, the IT guy that we worked closely with.
Look, I found Eleven! Apparently, they frequently switch out all of the Pops that are on the roof outside, so when they’re not outside, the Pops are sitting all around the office.
There’s Ben and Marvin the Martian.
Here’s the three of us, toughing it out, freezing our butts off doing the scene on the roof with the drone.
This is me in one of those side interviews. That was on day 3. I was still building my PowerApp, and was going as fast as I could, trying to get it complete by the end of the day, so that we could do our big, final presentation. Fun fact: In that last episode when we were presenting all of what we had built, I had spent so much time on the PowerApp, that I hadn’t even done the Flow yet at that point. I built it really quick while I was up on stage waiting my turn, and then thank goodness it worked like a charm when I did my demo! Whew!
This was at the very end, Sue and Ben and I were walking (just a couple of blocks) back to the hotel (see I had my walking shoes on), and I got Sue to snap this one last pic…
You can watch all of the webisodes here: https://aka.ms/SharePointSwoop
Here are a few other sites that wrote articles about our little adventure:
Hullabaloo wrote about their show: http://hullabaloo.tv/2018/08/01/sharepoint-swoop/ 
We all got together at the SharePoint Conference last year, and had a whole conference session about this show and answered questions from the audience. There’s Sue, Kurt, Ben, me, and Mark Kashman.
Here are Mark’s behind-the-scenes photos (a LOT of them)