Microsoft has never invested a lot in their blogs. It’s ok to say that SharePoint isn’t the best blogging platform. In fact I don’t shed a tear when I say it’s not the best wiki either. There are point solutions out there that are better than SharePoint and most SharePoint consultants will stand up and admit it. Maybe that’s even a good litmus test for your SharePoint consultant. Tell him you want to stand up a public blog and ask him what you should use.
I’ve had a great run with this blog on the SharePoint platform, but it’s driven me a little crazy over time. Rackspace has been great for giving me this complimentary blog for the last number of years. I still recommend Rackspace and fpweb as great alternatives to Office365 if you need more ability to customize your solution.
This is not the end of my blog, but on May 1st this blog will be moving to WordPress. I’ve found more than a dozen reasons why it will be a good thing for me and my blog. I’m already picking out a responsive design theme, and looking at the SEO capabilities, and social integration plugins and wow! There are some incredible things I can do. I’ll also be investing heavily in categories. I can already see some big investment of time ahead of me, but I think you will ultimately thank me for doing this when you’ll see that comments end up being usable and the descriptions are better when you share them in social media and so many many more things will just simply work better.
I did spend a few days thinking about Office 365 and the public blog. I even did a test migration and was pretty happy with it. I think it was the themes and plugins that won me over.
Big kudos to Bjorn Furuknap @furuknap for helping me in making this decision and in the communty who helped me support this big decision. This does not mean I’m not going to still be at sharepointjoel.com and it actually means I will be blogging more and you will have a better mobile experience, navigation experience and way more… tell me what you think on this new community platform called Nestivity. It’s in beta, and I think it’s got some promise.
Join the “What is the best blogging platform for SharePoint bloggers” discussion and leave a reply!!
I’d love to hear your thoughts on if you think I should still be using SharePoint or if you think I’m making a mistake with WordPress and if there’s something better still out there.
SPChitChat is our own Nestivity SharePoint Community instance. I plan to add more moderators as we get going. More on that later.
Help me count down the days…. This blog will be on WordPress on May 1.
I’ll provide some sneak previews and early beta for feedback as it gets closer.