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As we move into 2010 with both a new outlook with the excitement of a new product I’d like to look back and some highlights and lowlights.  This is my list.  Happy to look at yours and let me know and I’ll link back to them – Joel Oleson

Highlights

1. SharePoint Conference Explosion –   Not only did we have I bet 30 or more FREE SharePoint Saturdays with over 100 in attendance with many at 150+ booked in a short period of time.  Kudos to Michael Looter, Susan Lennon especially, but also Kevin and all of those who organized the various events like the recent SPSKC by @mosslover Becky, with 300 registered and over 200 in attendance, not only in the US. but across Europe, Australia, and coming soon to the Middle East!  good luck to SharePoint Saturday Jordan, see you there!  SPTECHCON has really taken off! SharePoint Connections and Tech ED and I remember Advisor days.  These days there’s a SharePoint conference happening somewhere every week.  Believe me, I’m trying to track as many of them as I can.  Even TEC known for its depth, joins the fray in the new year… with TEC2010 for SharePoint I’m actually running those SharePoint 2010 conference tracks.  Obviously it’s not without mentioning the sold out over and over 7000 attendees at the SharePoint conference beating out the numbers for Tech Ed US and busting up against the likes of PDC!

2. Media and Analyst Spotlight –   In the past 2 years SharePoint went from being a step child of office and windows and has taken front stage.  Not only does it have it’s own brand now, but now commands the attention of book publishers, magazines online and offline, and has really become the house hold name.  If anyone mentions recession to Microsoft, all they have to do is start talking about SharePoint revenue and growth… The fastest revenue generating product in Microsoft history, and you don’t hear that it’s slowed down.  Analysts love to talk about SharePoint.  In fact Google loves to mention and compare it’s newest ideas against SharePoint.  That’s pretty cool.  SharePoint has grown to the level where it’s loved to be hated because it has become so successful.  It’s no longer the David, it’s the Goliath.  Definitely you can see how the tables have been turned.

• SharePoint in Leaders Magic Quadrant for Enterprise CMS http://tinyurl.com/45fulu
• SharePoint leading the Social Software in the Workplace Magic Quadrant http://bit.ly/1P7J86
• Another such example is 10 Best Intranets Report by Jacob Nielsen’s Alert box where HALF (5/10) of the winning Intranets use SharePoint.  Will be interesting to see how the results change this next year. Nice growth diagram and more details in the report.

3. Growth of Expertise in the Community – When I was at MS, there was often a complaint that there were not enough experts in SharePoint.  While fast growth of the SharePoint MVPs have gone from 30 a few years ago, to over 160 and even had challenges ranking up with the largest MVP groups .NET and C# MVPs.  It’s tough to get to know all 160+, I do try.  Ask your local MVP how the community has grown.  They’ll be happy to tell you how you use to be able to know everyone.  It’s been a real challenge both keeping on top of growth, and expertise, but also helping distinguish between the gold rush that’s taken place over the past year or three.  What use to be rare, is less rare, but it’s still a huge deal to find a qualified SharePoint Expert.  Believe me.  Talk to a recruiter, despite the economics, there is still a demand for SharePoint developers and consultants.  If you aren’t seeing the jobs, you either aren’t looking or you aren’t in any of the groups on linked in.  The MCM for SharePoint has ultimately been a good thing.  Huge kudos to those who have gone through the program.  Sure it’s expensive, and 2010 MCM upgrades are bound to be interesting, but you can’t deny the quality that comes out… it is definitely impressive.  Kudos to the graduates, and even those that risk paying out their own pocket if they don’t pass.  It met many a candidate that was either paying out of their own pocket or would have to if they didn’t pass.  That’s serious guts!  Not a cheap risk and what’s the return?  Not just bragging rights, that’s a serious investment of time and money.  More info on the MCM blog

4.  Community Stickiness – I’m not sure what to call this, but something that stands out to me is the real true friendships that have been developed.  There is definitely something special about the SharePoint crowd.  For me, I saw this start in Boston in 2004 at Teched, but what’s really happened to not only the US and not only in the MVP group, but really globally people have been able to connect.  It’s been awesome with Twitter (I do give it the most credit), Facebook, and Linked in and all the social networks in terms of helping us connect online.  If you were at the SharePoint conference you can’t deny the connections that happened.  It was the “Hey I know you! You’re awesome, I love your (blog/tweets/articles/comics/newsgroup posts, etc…)!”  conversations along with the live blogging over at EUSP which helped fill in the gaps.  That SharePint that first official night after registration.  People had their twitter id’s on their T-Shirts, and the hundreds, possibly thousands of people who made what was an online solid connection into real friendships.  Yep it was awesome.  I’ve seen that same thing happen at SharePoint Saturday’s over and over.  Acquaintances becoming best friends in the course of an evening.  I made literally hundreds of friends this year, but people I would take a SharePoint bullet for.  I made some serious friendships, I know many did.  Definitely a very very special thing.  Those legitimately tagged SPC 20,000 tweets go to show the kind of sharing that happens.  It’s not all a popularity content.  There’s some honest to goodness sharing that’s happening. 

5. SharePoint User Group Expansion – I’ve been able to visit a large number of user groups this past year and still on a trek to visit the far reaches of the earth to hit the real passionate groups.  A few of my favorites were launching the group in Egypt with Marwan, and hitting the early the Moscow group with some previews of 2010 Russian language pack at the Moscow MTC, then even reaching out to the groups across India and finding real SharePoint passion around the globe.  Amazing.  The cool part is plugging these group leads in with the community.  I’m really looking forward to connecting with the groups in Peru, Chile, and Costa Rica.  I think South of the border needs more love.  The expansion in the Middle east has really been popping a lot in due to the passion of a few MVPs:  Mo, Neo, and Marwan.  They don’t need to be islands, they can connect, and they have. One such example is SharePoint4Arabs.com not only a blogging platform, but also a platform for training, user group announcements, and more.

Lowlights

1. Community Attacks & Blowups – I’m sure I could be blamed for exposing some warts, but there were at least a few more.  Other attacks and back stabbing needn’t be mentioned either.  I don’t want to focus on this, but tack this up to growing pains.  I think a lot of us have grown, and while there were some nasty warts and name calling, I hope psychologically we’ve all grown.  It’s amazing how personal some of the attacks became.  We are human, but I think we all have higher callings, we’ve been chosen, and we need to live to a higher standard.  It’s unfortunate we haven’t had a way of healing through this in a better way, but time has healed some of these wounds.  Those who have turned the other cheek and walk the higher ground, I applaud you.

2. ISV Challenges Revenue & Awareness – The vendor space has been a bit challenging this year.  Not only from the down turn, but challenges around helping with visibility.  How do you know what tools you need for SharePoint?  How do you even know what’s available.  This has been really tough for everyone.  I think SharePointReviews.com has done a good job, but I don’t think it’s over.  I have been impressed with SharePointAds.com to help with exposure for those that signed up.  They have a huge waiting list now.  There aren’t enough sites and blogs signed up to cover the ad money that the ISVs have paid.  This gap of money the vendors want to spend to help solve this awareness problem is bound to close more, but man it’s tough.  With thousands of SharePoint solutions, how could anyone know where to go?  (Full disclosure: I don’t get paid by SharePointReviews.com, but I do have SharePointAds on my blog, and I’m tons happier with it than Googleads or Amazon.  Most say it’s 10X better, and the ISVs are happier as well.)

While it’s great there is no clear winner, there isn’t even a clear top 5 vendors in any space.  It’s just plain confusing.  Sure I could rattle off a list, but then we find out there’s a few I’m missing.  Definitely happens… Awareness is a big problem.  I hope we can figure out how to get both consultants and customers better information on the best tools out there.  If you’ve got ideas…  I’m open.  This might be the one on the list that is most confusing for some.  Happy to explain how this vendor space hasn’t yet fully matured and we’ve lost some vendors in the space, and even those that had decent solutions didn’t pop (sell well).  There are some good companies and they are in for the long haul, so I expect much of this to be addressed as the market gets cleaned up more going into 2010.  I definitely had a few of these conversations with vendors at SPC.  We need more killer apps, and we need better ways of making sure the community (customers and partners) are aware of those killer apps.  The unification of intranets story from useit.com on Top 10 Intranets definitely provides hope for not only unification of platform, but better tools and consolidation.

3. Leaks – It was a big moment when SharePoint Designer/SharePoint hit big enough time that it was actually leaked and torrented.  It was sad to see people blogging about their use of NDA code.  It does matter, not only in legal terms, but in the levels of respect and trust in the community.  The policing was a bit sad as well. 

4. Plagiarism – There haven’t been isolated examples of this.  There were multiple break outs, and nasty things happening both in the blogosphere and more recently on twitter.  People taking full credit for blogs, and sure some to the lesser extent, but there was some blatant misuse.  A lot of correction has happened, but this still rears it’s ugly head and impacts our ability to give full credit where it’s due.

5. Blogging Challenges – SharePointBlogs.com had some challenges, SharePoint Community Kit had some growing pains, SharePoint Blogs, comments, discussions, and more have really had some challenges over the past year.  Not only from comment spam, but finding a real community that could provide a consistently available, backed up, and with decent performance.  I’ve changed platforms from SharePoint Hosting to Rackspace.  They’ve been very good to me.  I’ve seen others scramble and have to move their blogs.

Additional Reviews to Check out

2009 SharePoint Toolbox Review – SharePoint Administration Toolkit and walkthrough on SPDiag

As we round out the year, I was looking at some of my travel stats and wondering… I wonder if I’ve clocked up more miles than anyone else.  Sure I think I talk about it more than anyone I know, but maybe that’s because I like to share.  Not because I like to boast or brag.  At least I hope not.  I have had some in the past say they like the stories.  Some say less on travel, well many of us it’s our passion other’s it’s part of the job.

I’m a fan of the basic Trip it social media travel service.  Here’s my profile if you want to add me.  (I do like it better than Dopplr.com which I used in 2008.) Forwarding my plans to plans@tripit.com and getting an awesome summary on my mobile device in an offline app has been HUGE.  Can’t say much for the pro service yet, since I haven’t used it, but here are my stats for the year…

Most Travelled SharePoint People in 2009

* Based on my Tripit list and filtering out some non SharePoint people up to Dec 16 with friends/connections as of that date.

I know I’m not connected to everyone, but I am really only connected to 120 mostly SharePoint people who are or have been active in the past in the SharePoint community.  If I get anyone who wants me to update this chart with more data and to tally end of year scores, I’m happy to include some additional people and push the count down. * This list is purely for entertainment purposes.  As well if anyone wants me to remove them, let me know and I’ll accommodate that as well.  The accuracy of this is only as good as the info added to tripit, etc…

To give you the background this includes most trips, I started using it at the first of the year, so I have to guess it’s within 25,000 miles of accuracy.  150 days puts me a little under my limit of 50%.  It really has been about 2 weeks per month this past year, and my wife and kids have been real troopers.  With the birth of Dean I did limit travel for a month and a half in the middle.

I do know that it’s families who benefit by the job, but also suffer as a result of a primary bread winner being on the road.  It’s definitely not always as sexy as it seems.  Coming home at night to an empty hotel room is the pits.  The hours and hours of security checks and missed flights let alone the expenses.  Yuck!

5 Things I Hate about Travel

1. Going home to an empty hotel room at night, really doesn’t matter what upgrades you get, the TV doesn’t have your DVR from home and no one to snuggle with

2. The whole airport scene is awful, wait in this line, then wait in this line, and on and on.  To get to a destination you may wait in a dozen lines and have people go through your bag nearly half as many times.  There was one flight that was delayed 10 times, cancelled then delayed again for half a day.  I missed all of my meetings.

3. Airplane seats are the worst.  They are designed to pack as many people in as small area as possible, and that incline is just enough to make you think your not straight.  My back is always a problem after long flights.

4. Being gone – You miss the band concert, the overnighters, the firsts with a baby; and it’s not your pillow, it’s not your car, it’s not your house or your office, and if you need clippers or any essential you’re going to have to buy it if you didn’t pack it.

5. Early morning meetings on little to no sleep.  When you fly in, everyone locally works on their time zone and they really don’t care where you came from.  Meetings still start at 8am, even if it means 3am to you.  Even across the 3 time zones in the U.S. this gets bad, but across the pond to Europe and a day to adjust is a luxury and often not afforded.

You know I do love to travel, so this helps balance out all the cool blog posts this year about all the cool places I was able to see.

I guess you can tell what’s been on my mind…

It’s not all bad.  There are some perks with frequent fliers, frequent hotels, and frequent car rentals.

I have platinum, premium elite status on Delta/Northwest (since they combined), gold on American, as well as silver on United.  Essentially I’ve got my bases covered for this next year across the Skyteam, Star Alliance, One World.  I later learned a valuable lesson about focusing on one airline per alliance essentially one per partner group.  I plan to use some miles this year to visit the SharePoint User Group in Peru, and have open conversations with Brazil and Costa Rica, now.  I’ll be sure to report back on the evolution of my efforts to hit South America which essentially has been off the radar the past few years for most of the community.  I think we need to start sharing the love down south.  I call myself a global evangelist and try my best to serve in that capacity. 

With 19 car rentals I have 3 free days.  Is that good?

Having status in Marriott and Hilton has paid off with room upgrades free breakfast and often cheaper or free internet.  I must say that, it is worth collecting the points.  That’s a no brainer.

My tribute does include assistance from Michelle at Quest.  She’s helped me with major coordination on events and planning and a whole lot more.

I just finished reading an article on ITWorld talking about the Decline and fall of the relational database.  It’s an analytical review of various data models, object models, and information architectures minus any solid conclusion.  The article ends with what it calls a tentative conclusion as to it’s fall.  “I do not think that any one of the above camps can deliver a killer blow to the pre-eminence of the relational database but taken together, I think they have enough momentum to topple the giant.” Sean McGrath suggests.

SharePoint’s category in the article is “The chaoticians: Promote the benefits of ex-post-facto information structuring.”  In the same category is Google (for it’s search), Notes, and Autonomy.  While I enjoy the principal of we’ll figure out how to make sense out of our data after we get it there, I would suggest that while that model is very common in SharePoint it doesn’t have to be.  I’ve come across extremely structured SharePoint deployments.  The chaos of unmanaged deployments found valuable by the teams that use them for file sharing and collaboration bring stress to the information managers and IT management trying to get a handle on it. There are many preaching governance which sets up a plan to address the chaos and get everyone on the same page.  SharePoint ultimately provides read and write views and structure to both structured and unstructured data with a layer of authorization in a web interface.

Here’s my 2 cents.  In one ugly word it’s Mashups.  In three words,  it’s Business Connectivity Services.  SharePoint does bring together the unstructured and structured data and not only does it blur the lines as the author suggests, but it provides it up through search, and in SharePoint 2010 adds social elements of tagging, ratings, and meta data not only on the item, but enterprise policies and enforcement.  My design in this article isn’t to sell you on SharePoint, but to show you that the future doesn’t kill relational data.  It does move some of what is loosely relational and lightweigh applications building and moves it into SharePoint.  That which doesn’t move stays there.  Relational databases will not die, they will simply be exposed through various applications through full CRUD and CRUDQ applications.  SharePoint workspace even adds the ability to take data exposed through BCS through external lists, offline.

If you’ve spent any time with data structures in OneNote you’ll get a glimpse of the future of data in a single file.  (What’s new in OneNote 2010.)  Check out this video on multi user editing in OneNote 2010.  The OneNote database which has both structure and no structure at the same time as organized by the author.  You’ll see very clearly that data comes in very different types and formats and can be organized in views, audio, video, in objects, in shapes, sync to cloud, translation services, and drawings.  

In conclusion…

Users won’t need to care whether the data is a Wiki, XML, or Relational.  They don’t have to care if it’s a blob or an XML object.  They never have cared.  Those that design the applications will choose the right model for the data based on the need.  Just like SharePoint stores it’s data in SQL, SharePoint won’t replace databases and tables, it will simply continue to abstract them.  The layers of abstraction and the simplicity of doing so will only get easier.  A form for example might store it’s data in a sharepoint list, an XML file or blob, or in a database.  Designers will use a Designer tool (such as Infopath or SharePoint Designer) or word processor such as Word or OneNote or an online editor like Word or Online Web Application client.  The data structures are easily abstracted and becomes more irrelevant.

I’ve been held to NDA for the past couple of years.  What a relief and joy it is to be able to speak openly about the great innovations in SharePoint 2010.  This list is a mix and match of what I consider the big announcements, I’m sure this list could grow tons if it was taken at a feature by feature level for SharePoint 2010, but I’ve tried to group these by what I consider investment areas that pay off and help justify both playing with the public beta and justify upgrading when you have the chance.  There are a lot of others who are making their lists… there’s Ketaahns SharePoint 14 list. (I found this link after I was done, and it’s amazing how close the lists are…)  The SharePoint Team blog has a rundown of the SharePoint 2010 Features broken down by audience including a video, that is definitely one to ingest if you haven’t.

If you missed the Keynote or missed SPC all together, the first thing I ask you to do is to step through these videos which include the SPC09 keynotes as well as SharePoint 2010 customer highlights and SPC opening video.  There are more videos, clips from the keynote like “What is SharePoint” a clip from Steve Ballmer’s keynote including some behind the scenes videos by Dux.  If you weren’t at SPC, I’m sure you already feel the pain, and I’m sorry, but I’m happy to see all of the videos and content stream from the live blogging and content twitter so people could follow or catch up.

1. Social Media Investments – status integration with my sites, newsfeeds, my network, all that social media work around the my site.  This was totally hush hush.  I expect to see this area really expanded through the public beta in terms of best practices and community awareness.  I hope to see some real effort from the community around helping establishing how to take advantage of these features. There are a few mentions in the blogosphere including John Anderson’s summary from the SPC session on Social Computing, I’m sure there will be more as the presentation and bits become available.  Also make sure you get on the RSS of the SharePoint Enterprise Social Computing Blog

2. External lists – this was a great demo during the keynote.  Showing a SQL table with contact information subsequently shown in a SharePoint external contact list, taken offline in the SharePoint Workspace, and contact objects shown in Outlook.  BDC becomes BCS (Business Connectivity Services) with even much easier systems integration. There’s some documentation on MSDN for creating an external list.  Also follow the Business Connectivity Services Team Blog

3. Large lists – the list throttling was shown off in SharePoint 2010, but the real list sizes showing real scale and control from the farm administrator was impressive.  This was definitely used by the competition in the previous version to suggest that SharePoint didn’t scale.  Despite the ability to scale to 5 million items in a list in the 2007 version, the 2000 item limit per view was often suggested as a limit for the list due to poor use by end users of the features such as indexed columns, limiting the views or using folders.  Now with multi column indexes, and better control over item limited views, you can ensure that the queries are optimized and the list throttling and viewing will be better managed for performance of the server and the list.  The happy hour controls is a happy medium for those needing to break out to do queries that are not the best.    The SPDevWiki has some of the throttling screenshots and link to the ITPRO sneak peak video.  Watch the keynote video demos that Arpan does.

4. Better Network Differencing & SharePoint Offline in SharePoint Workspace – I stopped by the SharePoint workspace booth, and I think the biggest, best innovations are in the differencing algorithm between the client and server as well as offline (closer?) experience of SharePoint.  It’s still far from the 100% offline browsing experience, that may be a pipe dream with what can be done with webparts and search.  But now we get lists, and external lists offline as well as what we had before.  The peer to peer is still there, but the SharePoint uses are much more core to the product.  The licensing model pushes this tool mainstream with Office 2010 deployments.  What’s it missing… you gotta know:  Blogs, Wikis, Pages… Of course you can get Blogs RSS feeds in Outlook.  So really it comes down to Wikis and Pages.  SharePoint Workspace Team Blog

5. High Availability/ Disaster Recovery Innovation – While I can’t give this area a 10, I do give it a B for effort.  While replication is obviously a gap.  (I know you tried.) The now built in to be mirroring aware, and the removal of fault tolerance of the services such as scaled out indexing will make it TONS easier and more reliable to backup.  The configuration based backup is huge too.  If you’re not a SharePoint 2007 admin you don’t realize how crazy the backup and unreliable SSP backup/restore was.  SharePoint Solutions Blog on the 2010 Config Backup/Restore as well as Powershell with Screenshots on Disaster Recovery for 2010

6. Unattached Recovery – I think it’s pretty big deal that the product team decided to invest in the ability to recover from a restored database.  I remember asking for this pretty much every version.  So I do have to give them big kudos for hearing me and others around the ability to recover out of the database.  The UI is in central admin.  This was shown in the IT Pro sneak peak video, but I wasn’t able to clearly talk about what they had to do to support this.  Essentially there is now an API for recovering data out of a database that isn’t in the farm.  This is huge for pulling data out of a snapshot, and really reduces the need for a recovery farm, while I don’t think it fully eliminates that need due to discovery, but that’s another blog.  SPDevwiki has some screenshots and TechNet now has articles on the Topic of Unattached 2010 Recovery.  Illia Sotnikov gives us good overview of the evolution of the 2010 Backup/Recovery features

7. Admin Insights through the Logging & Usage database, and dev dashboard – The logging database with published schema!  Thank you!  That’s awesome.  The ULS logs were such a pain, definitely looking forward to seeing all the right stuff getting logged and throttled into a database that does know what filling up drive with pure chattiness means.  (I know that was a recent fix as well.) Those types of things do matter!  The developer dashboard, ok, I’m over it.  Call it developer, that’s fine, but we’ll benefit from it too!  The dev dashboard is pure awesome.  It’s like turning on debugging.  I’d recommend setting it to “on demand” for Intranets.  Making it easy for support to troubleshoot complaints on a portal page, or collaboration sites.  Why not?  For most environments I’d suggest turning it to “on” for dev, and “on demand” for test.  On the internet you do likely want to keep it off.  (Use STSADM or powershell to toggle the setting.)  Better to have people convinced the slowness is them or the wire, not the page or the server.  It would be over most heads of the people browsing an internet page anyway who would want to blame your server or SharePoint.  Phil Wicklund – how to enable Dev Dashboard, Bob Fox has a what is Developer Dashboard, the SharePoint 2010 Dev Sneak Peak Video has a great demo of it.

8. Service Applications – The service oriented architectures and the buzz words of what SOA has become get a huge boost in SharePoint 2010.  I’d like the search from the central portal, the profiles from the social media farm, the taxonomy and meta data from the ECM environment, and analysis and access services from the Finance deployment.  As farms have become more specialized in large enterprises so have the expertise of those that run them.  The one off custom farms that may end up departmentalized, don’t have to be limited in their services.  They can get the richness of the global indexing and not have that be redundant indexing. Serge van den Oever SSP is dead, long live Service Applications, Spence Harbar has Service Applications Model Overview, and Andrew Connell’s New Service Application Architecture

9. SharePoint Designer Enhancements like portable workflows, and granular delegation – I didn’t hear the buzz I was expecting to about SPD during SPC.  The huge innovations in SPD are exactly addressing the feedback that they were asked to implement, but only the SPD fans heard it.  Portable workflows is huge, so is that ability to have people use SPD in the way you want them to.  Only want them to use the FREE, yep still free SharePoint 2010 is free, tool for workflows, fine.  Only want the design team to use it for design, that’s cool.  The NDA kept us from telling you that SharePoint Designer really makes some big moves in the right direction around portability, control, and delegation.  The same areas, that I thought it needed most.  Let alone the even further flexibility of further integration, and BCS integration. SharePoint Designer Team Blog

10. Sandbox Solutions – now solutions built from the SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio are all .WSP.  Great to see that consistency, but beyond that now SharePoint administrators can control the resources consumed from these client deployed sandboxed solutions which don’t require the admin to deploy.  While in the past SharePoint administrators needed to deploy any solution, this option, yep it’s an option, allows you to throttle the system resources and allow those who own/administer sites to deploy solutions.  The delegation and control is there.  I think we’ll see much more best practices from more usage of sandboxed solutions, but now custom farms can still run out of the box software.  It will be very interesting to see what can be done with these and how well the throttling of system resources works with these solutions. Eli Robillard’s Enhanced Security with Sandboxed Solutions, MSDN already has a Module on Sandboxed Solutions for Webparts

I save enhancements in upgrade and the real power in powershell for SharePoint 2010 for exclusive dedicated posts…  So don’t think I don’t appreciate those.  Too many to list!!! (Here’s a link to the new TechNet 2010 Upgrade Resource Center. And resources for Powershell like the SharePoint 2010 Quick start guide for Powershell, and reference on the 492 SharePoint 2010 powershell cmdlets by Dmitry Sotnikov

Here’s a quick list of the Product Team Blogs around SharePoint 2010 that will definitely be sharing more…

• SharePoint Team Blog
• SharePoint Enterprise Social Computing Blog
• Business Connectivity Services Team Blog
• SharePoint BI Blog
• SharePoint Enterprise Search Blog
• SharePoint Content Management (ECM) Team Blog
• Records Management Team Blog
• Office Web Applications
• PerformancePoint Services
• SharePoint Designer Team Blog
• SharePoint Workspace Team Blog

SharePoint 2010 Site on SharePoint 2010

• SharePoint 2010 Overview and Demos

Developer SharePoint 2010 MSDN Resources:

• MSDN Library – SharePoint 2010
• SharePoint 2010 Developer Center
• SharePoint 2010 MSDN Forums

IT Pro SharePoint 2010 TechNet Resources

• SharePoint 2010 TechNet Tech Center
• SharePoint 2010 TechNet Forums
• SharePoint 2010 Content Posters

One thing I *really* like about blogging is the debates that go on in the blogosphere.  I love a good debate, as long as it doesn’t get personal.  I mean come on.  Your blog is your own, say what you want… we all live in the land of freedom of speech of the provided by the Internet.  Does SharePoint Suck or does it rock??  Should we be comparing the product written 5 years ago to the latest open source or google sites?  I don’t think it’s fair, but the comparisons will continue.  I do hope to have some of these open debates after SPC, when my tongue gets loosed.

Bil Simser “SharePoint FUD is spreading far wide and fast” and his arch nemesis Bjorn Furuknap “SharePoint sucks and here’s why (part 1 in a continued series)” are at it again with some great mud slinging, but not at each other.  It’s a debate about SharePoint.  Rackley helps push forward the debate with “SharePoint Haters just don’t understand.”  Paul Culmsee defends Infopath from Bil as the greatest product in his post “Why Infopath Rocks” I think this actually might have begun after the post from the SharePoint Developer that uses Drupal.  I think there’s some decent content, but most of it doesn’t apply when you look at the new stuff.  So it’s just poor timing.  It’s also written as Drupal rocks, what sucks about SharePoint.

The real challenge I see is the 3 year release cycle for SharePoint.  It’s much more regular from the release cycle of SQL or Windows, you can almost set your yearly watch to it.  Some of these scrappy open source products have figured a few things out.  They’ve got something in wikis, blogs, and other social networking features.  3 years is more than a decade in our current rate of growth.  So yeah, it feels like you’re running ancient technology to deploy a SharePoint wiki, really the first productized over the counter wiki on the market.  I hope to see MS address this beyond what happens in the community with CKS (Community Kits).  The tools teams can do a better job of putting out decent updates and I expect the threats to be decent enough that we’ll see some serious moves especially in Online services.

The DANCE.  The SharePoint dance is understanding what can be changed in a SharePoint environment without making it tough to support, or making it difficult to upgrade or worse.  It’s not like a new .NET project.  There’s already something there, and you need to learn how it behaves and moves.  As developers get experience and as the tools get better this dance is a lot smoother and lady SharePoint won’t do those hard core gyrations so much.  When you learn this dance, and by the way it’s not a 2 step or a waltz, you’ll come to find the rhythm of the product and overcome the hater mentality and actually come to fully embrace the product and the richest community in existence.  There’s no community around a product tighter and closer than the SharePoint community.  We are all in this dance together, so crank up the music and enjoy what we’ve got and yes this new dance partner rocks, let me be the first to tell you.