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You know the rest of that adage, “…stays in Vegas except for the Twitter timeline and Facebook stream”, but what happened in Cambridge, MA was streamed live to CT.

What can I say; New England is a pretty big territory. Siri says it covers 71,990 square miles of membership. Well she says "I can't find a contact named Newt Inglend" but I know what she meant.

What happened in Cambridge, MA you ask? SharePoint happened; it happened in a Microsoft facility and it was streamed via Lync, including live video of Nick Inglis and Marcel Meth. Nick talked about what we should do and why we should do it, and Marcel shared his experience from a real live example of a company that is doing it now. Of course, I am talking about the most recent event of the AIIM New England Chapter, and I am happy to add that it was a success (except for the weather and for those of us who entered the building in search of the 4^th floor via an elevator whose only buttons were 1 and 2). Interestingly, most of the attendees took that in stride; maybe that comes from working with SharePoint.

Nick shared a few statistics that, in aggregate told us that people use SharePoint for lots of different things but most didn’t plan on using SharePoint for anything at all. The most memorable slide (are they called slides in Prezi?) is the one where he said “define what ‘anything’ is before you end up with everything in SharePoint!” Along the rolling mix of information, statistics, standards, experience and opinion, Nick built the case for governance, and then he talked about how to make that case in your organization. Of course, as the author of the “SharePoint 2010 Governance Toolkit” published by AIIM (and available for free to professional members, ahem, just sayin), Nick should know these things.

After Nick entertained us with theory, Marcel Meth shared a real-world experience from his work at Novartis. Marcel walked us through the business challenge, the iterative process of defining and redefining requirements, the tools and techniques he used to automate a business process centered on a record keeping function. The marriage of sound theory, best practices and real life is exactly what you can expect at an AIIM Chapter event, and our event today was no exception.

In the end it was clear that SharePoint is a platform on which you can build amazing solutions to automate everything from ordinary to challenging business processes. Nick stressed and Marcel reinforced the notion that planning and a good design are necessary to reach the goal of having a good solution.