Editor’s note:  Julie’s AIIM post was initially published last week during the conference, but was accidentally “unpublished” shortly thereafter.  Julie is not actually unstuck in time.

Hello from San Francisco and the AIIM Conference 2012! We are very busy at the AIIM conference talking to a variety of attendees and listening to some great speakers.

Yesterday, I sat in three great sessions. Bert Sandie, from Electronic Arts (EA), talked about Maximizing Your SharePoint Investment – Social, Sharing, and Search. He emphasized three main points: (1) think differently, (2) focus on user experience, and (3) curate your content. It was interesting to see his real-life examples from EA and learn how they are leveraging SharePoint as their Knowledge Portal.

I also listened to Karthik Chakkarapani from Salesforce.com discuss Business Transformation Through Enterprise Collaboration. He introduced me to a new term, “gamification.” This is what you need to add to your Intranet site to motivate your users and improve participation in collaboration initiatives. Give them something interesting to do when they visit the site(s). I was thinking of several Bamboo Web Parts that could be used to “game-ify” your SharePoint-based Intranet…. Community Central, Knowledge Base Solution Accelerator,  Poll Web Part, Video Library, Virtual Map View, and Rating Web Part, to name a few.

Another session I attended was Collaborate or Die: Reflections on A&P Supermarkets & The Social Business Age presented by Nick Inglis from AIIM. I remember A&P grocery stores as a kid in the Philadelphia area. Nick had a great presentation that pointed out how A&P failed to modify its business plan to deal with the advent of the automobile. His message was clear: don’t let the latest trends in collaboration and social business catch you unprepared.

We are hosting a roundtable discussion at 1:30 this afternoon called Necessary Tools in the Virtual Worker Environment and look forward to lots of interesting ideas presented to the participants. If you are at AIIM, we hope you will join us!