Dux Raymond Sy's "jumpstart workshop," Delivering Enterprise SharePoint Success at SHARE, served as the opening ceremonies for SHARE 2012 this afternoon.  The session began with a video consisting of various SharePoint notables answering the question, "How do you define SharePoint success?"  My personal favorite response might have been the first one showm, provided by SHARE speaker Christian Buckley: "When people actually use it." 

Following the short video, a dapper-as-ever Dux took the stage to discuss how attendees could best go about achieving the various levels of SharePoint success that had been defined in the video montage.  Dux explained that the goals of the conference include identifying key issues and challenges around SharePoint in the enterprise, and providing tips, tricks, and best practices to help overcome those challenges.  Dux suggested that the first question that should be asked is, "Why SharePoint?"  and he went on to say, "I want to look at it from the lens of the business" in order to best answer that question.  In doing so, Dux offered his answer in three parts:

1. "SharePoint empowers the business." By way of example, Dux explained that with SharePoint, project managers can create their own project sites after the briefest of training from IT … with no more need to fill out a service request and wait for the work to be done. Dux demonstrated the ease of scheduling a kickoff meeting within his SharePoint project site via the built-in project calendar. On his Mac, Dux showed the SharePoint experience in both Mac and Windows 8 environments. "The beauty of SharePoint as a platform is that it's tied to existing Office tools that people use every day," Dux pointed out, showing that meeting information housed in Web-based SharePoint calendars is also available in your Outlook calendar (and vice versa).
2. "SharePoint enables the business." "Taking it up a notch," Dux explained that automating processes (change management requests, onboarding, etc.) is a natural for SharePoint. As an added bonus, with automated processes come built-in visibility and accountability. Using a SharePoint list, out-of-the-box, Dux quickly demonstrated how to automate a change request process using an existing workflow template. Addressing compliance (SOX, etc.), Dux said that using the integrated-with-SharePoint Word Office Web App to edit a document can also be accomplished using the Word client (yes, even on a Mac). Furthermore, changes to documents are automatically tracked and archived, and are visible via the Compare Specific Versions feature. As well, document co-authoring allows for multi-author editing of Word docs, live, in tandem, with SharePoint handling the versioning for you automatically.
3. "SharePoint unifies collaboration." Showing his company, Innovative-e's public-facing SharePoint 2010 site as an example of unified collaboration, Dux demonstrated SharePoint's value as a unifying platform. Using SharePoint for their company intranet, for project management, and for their extranet, collaboration is unified. Dux's specific example involved showing how intranet content that's also appropriate for the public-facing site simply "flows through" to the extranet. The events calendar is connected to Outlook via SharePoint and as such, Outlook events render on the extranet (following content approval since that's required by default). That same event information is surfaced, via the same process, on Dux's blog, which lives outside the Innovative-e domain.

Dux suggested that your best path to SharePoint success involves asking questions and seeking answers in line with the three points above by asking: "How can I use SharePoint to empower the business?" ; "How can I use SharePoint to enable the business?"; and "How can I use SharePoint to unify collaboration?"