UPDATE: Please note that this event location has changed. It is taking place in Microsoft's Waltham Office, on 201 Jones Rd, Waltham, MA.

The Boston Area SharePoint Users Group (BASPUG) was founded to bring together like minds to network and share their experiences, triumphs, and tribulations around Microsoft SharePoint, to provide a community platform for Boston area SharePoint users, administrators, developers, architects, of all experience levels, even brand new to SharePoint, to share their knowledge with the community. We meet on the 2nd Wednesday of every month at either the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge, MA, or at the Microsoft office in Waltham on Jones Road.

PLEASE BE SURE TO ALLOW SPONSORS TO CONTACT YOU WHEN REGISTERING! THEY PAY FOR YOUR FOOD ONE NIGHT A MONTH, AND HELP MAKE THESE MEETINGS POSSIBLE!

PRESENTER
The presenter for our next meeting is Bill English, SharePoint MVP and CEO of MindSharp. He will be presenting "SharePoint Maturity and User Adoption: Assessing your Deployment from Two Complimentary Viewpoints".

Session Abstract
SharePoint’s rapid adoption in the business community has created interesting challenges, one of which is understanding the proficiency of the organization’s use of this platform.  In order to better understand SharePoint proficiency, Bill English, CEO of Mindsharp, will discuss an organization’s use of SharePoint both from a maturity model as well as an adoption model.  These models integrate to help you:

• Understand why your organization may not be getting everything it can from SharePoint
• Understand potential paths to success if you have been disappointed with your SharePoint deployment
• Understand how users naturally adopt new software platforms with ideas on why you should ensure your adoption practices align with natural adoption practices

This session is not a technical drill-down session.  Instead, we’ll all be challenged to think more strategically and critically about our SharePoint deployments.

Demos:  There are no demos with this presentation

Critical Decision Points Discussed:

• How to improve user adoption processes
• Tradeoff elements in the scope of your SharePoint deployment
• Understand how to grow your deployment  in a successful manner

About Bill
Bill English is an industry leader, author, and educator specializing in SharePoint Products and Technologies. As Chief Executive Officer of EBA Companies (Mindsharp and The Best Practices Conference), Bill draws on his experience in business management to teach and consult about integrating SharePoint functionalities to business processes and information organization needs. Microsoft has acknowledged Bill’s professional contributions to the SharePoint community by awarding him the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for eleven consecutive years. Since 2000, Bill has authored 14 books on Exchange and SharePoint products, including the Administrator’s Companion for SharePoint Server 2010 by Microsoft Press.  Bill lives in Minnesota with his wife and two children, where summer is the six best days of the year! 

MEETING SPONSOR - Axceler
Since 1994, Axceler solutions have enabled enterprises to simplify, optimize and secure their collaborative platforms. Today, Axceler is a global leader in managing SharePoint governance, security, migration, reporting and analysis. Among its numerous Microsoft SharePoint solutions, Axceler offers awarding-winning ControlPoint for governance and administration, Davinci Migrator for migration from 2003 and 2007 environments to the SharePoint 2010 platform, and FileLoader for migrating file share content to SharePoint while adding and updating metadata.

More than 2,000 organizations worldwide are using Axceler products to control their SharePoint environments. Headquartered in Woburn, MA, USA, Axceler maintains offices in Seattle, Los Angeles, London and Sydney. For more information visit www.axceler.com, or follow us on Twitter at @Axceler

SUSTENANCE
Food and beverages will be provided at the event.

RAFFLE PRIZES
We will be handing out raffle tickets at the BASPUG meetings.

• Black Blade Associates will be raffling off a license, valued at $2000 for their SharePoint Zip product.
• Lightning Tools will also be raffling off a license for their BCS MetaMan (or other) product
• We also have books and more!