On Wednesday, March 17, 2010, I attended a seminar presented by Allyis Principal Consultant Ken Efta focusing on what’s new in SharePoint 2010, some of the platform’s key new features and their benefits to business productivity.

Here’s a short video of Ken in action:

That’s really just to make you jealous if you weren’t there — Ken’s a great teacher.

In this next video, I talked with Ken for a few minutes after his presentation about his takeaways from his interactions with the audience. The seminar was highly interactive and it was clear from the questions that the audience asked that there are some distinct business process, productivity and knowledge management challenges they are trying to overcome. There was a really good discussion about the ways in which SharePoint might be able to address those issues for them.

Shocking as it may be to hear it, even I learned during Ken’s seminar. I learned, for example, that many “out-of-the-box” features of SharePoint 2010 address these kinds of business issues directly. That should save a lot of frustration. And earlier versions of SharePoint can be made to address these kinds of issue with a little under-the-hood customization. Many organizations have made a huge investment in SharePoint, now the challenge is to figure out how to maximize their return by using SharePoint to the full extent of its capabilities.

I’m interested in hearing from you now: what are the key business operations challenges you face? Are they the same as the ones Ken mentions in the second video? Different ones? What tools do you use to address those challenges and how satisfied are you with those tools? If you use SharePoint, what has your experience with it been like?

I want to learn from you what you’re really dealing with day in and day out, so I appreciate your input more than you know.