March 2009 Blog Posts
[Via Mirjam] This has been around for ages, but I never saw it originally. It includes tenants of the right approach to blogging. Some of my favorites include: Blogs that are purely self-promotional can quickly fizzle out. Be outwardly focused, rather than self-focused. Find other bloggers in your niche that you respect and work with them rather than against them. Get away from the computer once in a while and do something recreational or creative. Essential reading for the SharePoint blogosphere, which of late has been loosing the...
I spend *way* too much time talking to customers about Web Parts versus Field Controls. Especially on migration projects when folks are doing feature comparison matrix type work to define how to implement what they used to have in other products before moving into the 2000s with SharePoint. My good buddy, AC has just announced the availability of his excellent white paper on the topic – hopefully this will help reduce the time suck on this important, but fundamental topic. It’s on MSDN, but IT Pros also absolutely must know this stuff. ***NOW AVAILABLE*** MSDN: Understanding Field Controls...
During the MVP Summit in Seattle a couple weeks back down I sat down with Rob Foster and Nick Swan for an interview on the SharePoint Pod Show. I waffled about various topics, some of which you may find interesting. Challenges in Enterprise SharePoint Deployments-Episode 20
I’m often asked for book recommendations. One of the good and bad things about the popularity of SharePoint 2007 is there are now gazillions of titles to choose from. Back in the day you’d struggle to find any SharePoint material on the shelves and in 2001 there was only one decent book at all. Today it’s a different story. Trouble is with quantity comes an inevitable decrease in quality. Of late however there has been a number of excellent books published. I’m not saying these are the ones you should get, but rather that the ones listed below are ones...
If you have been in any of my SharePoint admin classes or worked with me on deployments you will be familiar with one of my favorite topics, the ‘hidden cost’ of SharePoint. I’m not talking about scary topics like ‘governance’, ‘best practices’, culture change, end user training, or Enterprise CALs, but rather all the other things you absolutely must have when operating SharePoint in the enterprise. It’s long overdue that I post a summary here for all those who want the key takeaway information. This is not a criticism of the SharePoint stack. None of these things are really...
Last week I finally got my hands on the “new” Sony Reader PRS-700. I’m very happy! I had tried to get one in San Diego in late February but was denied. Luckily there was no repeat of the Borders saga back in 2006 when I tried to get the original 500. Walked in on Sunday, picked it off the shelf and bought it – I got the black one rather than the silver. There were no gift cards which is kinda annoying but those can wait. I haven’t spent a huge amount of time using it, but enough...
SharePoint MVPs had a great week in Seattle and Redmond last week and the annual MVP Summit. One of the common discussion topics during the evenings was that of Test Driven SharePoint Development, its pros and cons and so forth, following on from the debate in the blogosphere. Indeed we got so deep and technical a small group of us decided to record some videos to push out to the community. In the videos we interview Andrew Woodward, one of the leading experts on using TDD with SharePoint. Check them out: Video: Test Driven Development - Part1 Video: Test...
Next month, April 6th thru 8th, the SharePoint Best Practices Conference comes to Europe. London is the place to be, specifically the QEII Conference Center. You can register for the event here. I’ve had the privilege to present at the first event in Washington DC, and more recently the second in San Diego,CA. This conference is a great show with superb speakers and the low down dirty what you need to know to be successful with SharePoint. No fluff. No marketing. Find out more about the agenda and speakers at http://www.sharepointbestpractices.co.uk. This time around we have a great...
SharePoint Joel has some good points over on his recent post regarding the waste of space that most documents are. Certainly I can agree with this – I’ve seen and produced enough of these things over the years – a few unfortunate souls have even read the ones with my name on the front! I guess apologies are in order to you all at this point :)
However, such a generalization is extremely dangerous albeit it a good controversy for debate. (Darn, now I’m humming that guitar lick).
The bottom line here is it depends upon the content. All this social computing...