Collabshow.com

<Updated 12/16 12:30PM Version 1.1> –  I’ve been wanting to compile a list of 100 SharePoint People to follow on Twitter and was hoping to have a statistical way of providing you the best or most influential SharePoint twitter people.  Instead,  I’ll give you my list and tell you that I think this represents a good 80% of the core stuff, while there is likely a bunch I’m missing I hope to extend the list and even have a scientific method of compiling a list in the future.  Note I did purposely leave off people who have left SharePoint (sorry LLiu), and those who haven’t tweeted in months or only tweeted a couple of times (with the exception of a couple of Asian SharePoint MVPs at the bottom of the list as Asia isn’t well represented).  I also gave preferential treatment to those who actually had pictures.  I think this list is a good mix of community, strong SharePoint Twitter people, and MVPs who have tried to contribute to SharePoint on Twitter.

Why Twitter?  I answered this question in a previous blog in how I see business value in Twitter and another on 10 steps to successful microblogging (with twitter and friendfeed, etc…).  You can even get a video view into what my tweetdeck looks like in a recent podcast having fun with SharePoint in Tweetdeck.

In my attempts at finding an easy solution to help us sort out the more influential tweeters, I found some interesting tools such as http://www.Tweetstats.com, Twitter Grader and Twinflluence (which has real promise with a rich API) TwitterCounter is a nice one for your blog, and TweetBurner tracks the links you share.  I’m now using http://www.twitterless.com/joeloleson but my experience is early in this beta.

One I came past does show a simple counter for most followed like a virtual league TwitterLeague.com after I make sure I have those that care to be in this list, I can do a quick pass with that app to do more of a stack rank.  Shown above on the left.  Followers alone don’t show the power of influence like twinfluence shows, but # of followers does represent a significant following and in our field can show the relative influence of a microblogger.

<updated> If you are looking for a rank order of SharePoint Community People by Rank from Twitterleague.com (no big buckets or service).

In no particular order, here are some SharePoint People on Twitter that are great to follow.  (Note this is based on my experience on Twitter.)

Auto SharePoint Twitterfeeds:

1. SharePoint – Blogs from the SharePoint Team Blog
2. SharePointMVPs – Partial list of SharePoint MVP blog post title tweets
3. SPtweeters
4. zevenseas – Collection of SharePoint Blog Feeds from zevenseas

Other SharePoint MVPs to watch/follow as they figure out the twitterverse…

garybushey

Stephen Cummins (secure)

ssofian – Steve Sofian – SharePoint MVP (Singapore)

kitkai – Kit Kai – SharePoint MVP (Singapore)

bobmixon

jholliday John Holliday (I think he likes to try things once 🙂 Nice podcast.)
toddbleeker – Come on you create a profile and not a single tweet?

ldusolier

shaneperran

TonyBierman

Upcoming Conference Twitter accountst

MIX09

SharePointBP

spsaturday

MOSSCamp

Secure SharePoint Tweeters:

Jonathan Kauffman – Search GPM Still waiting for him to accept my following.

KKRSeattle – Kristian Rickard Enterprise Search,  (secure) Fast GPM

erobillard (Secure) Eli Robbilard – SharePoint MVP (Toronto)

SharePoint PMs that really LOVE SharePoint and fly under the radar on twitter.  We may not want to randomize them as they are working on 14, but I hope to see them get more active as it gets more public.  I see a few of these guys are fairly open about who they are in their profiles.

LoungeFlyZ Chris Johnson – PM Dev experience
zorbadgreek  George Perantatos – SharePoint & Office Labs

umeshunni Umesh Unnikrishnan  – PM Services

tylerbutler Tyler Butler – PM Content Management/Content Deployment

MisterMorrill – Kevin Morrill – PM Social Features

Not enough people to follow?

This list is not complete, and is really pretty random based on my own experiences and really based on one night of walking through recent conversations and tweeting experiences I’ve had.

There are some apps to help you expand your circle:

http://www.Twollow.com – This wild app will help you add people fast based on terms they use in their tweets

Twubble – This app will make recommendations for friends based on your current friends (doesn’t scale if you have thousands of friends)

http://search.twitter.com/advanced Search has gotten better on Twitter, but it feels burried at times.  People search in some ways seems worse to me.

TweetDeck – This is my favorite app for following twitter.  The web UI is really pretty weak.

By the way, feel free to put your name and number of followers in the comments and why you think you should be listed here.

I welcome your feedback. 

One of the last things I did with Bamboo just released.  I did an interview with John Anderson of Bamboo side by side with the launch of a new Admin area on their community efforts.  John’s probing deep questions really brought out areas that I hadn’t thought about in a long time.  They also stretched my thoughts into the future.  They were written in such a way that it really captured some unique insights.

The Joel Oleson SharePoint Interview is captured in the Rock Stars area.

Here are some examples of the questions:

• Can you briefly sketch out, from your firsthand experience, the evolution of (what came to be known as) SharePoint from its inception to the current MOSS 2007 version?
• What would you say was the biggest challenge the SharePoint team faced during your tenure?
• Just a few weeks ago, you announced your acceptance of a position at Quest Software.  Can you tell us a bit about your role at Quest?  I understand that one of your responsibilities will be designing new tools to help IT administrators…
• More in the interview…

And a snippet of one of my answers:

What is your vision of collaborative computing five years from now?

The rapid development that happens on the Internet in social computing will converge.  One example is the number of social bookmarking platforms.  There are literally hundreds, and the value is still low and personal since there are so many.  The FriendFeeds, Facebooks, and Twitters of today will encompass more of these features and functionality, but the base of applications that span to give us different interfaces to tag.  I expect Digg, Del.icio.us, and the others to be much more clearly led by one or two market leaders that have integrated search.  Google’s Readers, Chrome, and its Web client apps come together with tighter integration with the social platforms, and Microsoft’s Azure embraced with Office Web Applications and choice in the browser space.  The way we add properties today in documents will be tagging, and we’ll know when people create docs in the enterprise that relate to us.  It’s rich multi-user editing in Word, OneNote, etc…  The value in followings in companies is going to be interesting.  You don’t want to fire the guy who has hundreds of internal people following his document authoring and blogging.  The masses will rise up!  I love that idea of someone at the bottom in the long tail influencing management so much that they are following him visibly, and soon he’s a secret executive such as distinguished engineers.  These ICs (individual contributors) can have more flexibility in their jobs because their value is understood and appreciated by the execs.  How would that be?

Launch of the SharePoint for Administrators Bamboo Blog

In the new portal I provided an intro article in this area includes some information on Metrics and Measures for the Tier 1 support team, the Tier 2 ops team, and Engineering including some info on Information architecture.  This article lays out SharePoint Administration in a tiered structure and may provide insight not previously considered.

Including a list of good SLA metrics for Tier 1:

What does Tier 2 Operations do on a day to day basis?

   o DBCC – Database Consistency Checks
   o Database Backups
   o Database Index Maintenance
   o Defrag
   o Whitespace and Growth management
   o Disk

Tier 3 or Engineering

• Planning for high availability
• Upgrade validation and steps
• Storage management
• Performance management over time
• Risk management
• Oversight on change management
• ITIL and MOF implementation with the PMO (Project Management Office) team
• Database management plans and optimization techniques
• Operations best practices
• Cluster solutions
• Virtualization and imaging solutions and testing (may be outsourced)
• Reviewing usage reports and making recommendations for scale up / scale out
• Firewall and security management reviews
• Optimization plans and techniques
• Meeting with the dev teams to ensure best practices
• Investigating list scale, database scale, and site and site collection scale issues, and providing guidance and best practices

As well in this new area you can find a lot of deployment essentials as well as good resources on deployment and optimization.

Finally, some good work has been done in making SharePoint the defacto portal and upping it’s compliance in the community.  WSRP Producer Toolkit.  For those people on the Java side of the house, or for those in a mixed environment this means.  Many in mixed environments have been looking for SharePoint to not just consume WSRP compliant information, but also to produce it so it can be consumed by WSRP consumers like BEA’s Portal, WebSphere, SAP, etc…  Check out more at TechNet Office SharePoint Server Interoperability TechCenter

Thanks Ryan on the WSRP Producer MSDN samples announcement at the SharePoint Team site.  Nice vids.  This will just make it even easier to put a check box in how SharePoint can do whatever you need it to.

If you’re looking at this next calendar year and trying to decide what conference to go to you’ve got a daunting task ahead of you.  Sooo many good choices!  I’ve had this post in draft and have been planning on putting out my calendar… Essentially after I saw Dave Pae put out conference list, I realized I had a lot of things on my calendar…  Here’s what I’m aware of, plus more.

I see the first official mention of a SharePoint Conference in 2009.  I also see the link to sign up to find out about the SharePoint Conference 2009 is on the mssharepointconference.com site.  I guess we can rule out that this conference will NOT be before Tech Ed.  I can’t speculate, but I do recommend getting on this email list.

SharePoint Related Conferences

SharePoint Technology Conference
January 27–29, 2009: Burlingame, CA
For three exciting days in January, you’ll be eating, drinking, sleeping, talking and living Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Services. The first day at SPTechCon is filled with intense full and half-day workshops, half in the morning, half in the afternoon. The next two days are filled with more than 50 break-out classes to choose from. Build your own custom program! This conference is hosted by BZ Media LLC. Line up includes Tom as keynote.  Speakers include many MVPs and leaders including Shane Young, Todd Klindt, and Nicola Young, John Ross, and Mike Watson.

SharePoint Best Practices Conference
February 2–4, 2009: San Diego, CA
The SharePoint Best Practices Conference eliminates design, deploy, organization and administration confusion, replacing disorder with Clarity, Direction and Confidence.  This conference is hosted by Mindsharp.  Keynote, Joel Oleson. This line up is MOST impressive: Ben Curry, Mike Watson, Bill English, Bob Fox, Bob Mixon…. I already did a post on this best practices conference.

2009 SharePoint .Org Conference

March 22-24: Baltimore, MD

For Associations and Not for Profit Organizations, SharePoint Conference for networking and education networking

Sharepoint Connections — Dev Connections Spring 2009

March 22-25, Orlando FL

Ritz Carlton & JW Marriott – Penton Media.  150+ Sessions from Microsoft, MVPs, and more.  I’ll be giving a couple sessions in the IT and Leadership track.

European SharePoint Best Practices Conference

April 6-8 2009:

London, UK. Hosted by Combined Knowledge.  This is sure to be the best SharePoint related Conference in Europe, this year. It already has an amazing speaker line up. This conference was just announced this week, and hey, I am Keynote! Woohoo!  Check out the killer line up of the SharePoint greats.  Steve Smith MVP, Spence MVP, Mike Watson (X MSFT), Todd Bleeker MVP, Andrew Connell MVP, Penny Coventry MVP, Bob Fox MVP, Andrew Woodward MVP, Natalya Voskresenskaya MVP (Blogger think Squirrel)

Montreal SharePoint Summit

April 6-8: Montreal, Canada

Centre-Mont-Royal

Third annual SharePoint summit.  Speakers include Errin O’Connor, Mike Fitzmaurice, and Bill English

Conferences that will have lots of SharePoint Sessions

Microsoft FASTforward ’09 (SEARCH+)
February 9–11, 2009: Las Vegas, NV
3 days of compelling discussion on the evolving business environment and how search is enabling companies to succeed.  This conference is hosted by Microsoft. (Text from SharePoint Team blog)

Microsoft MIX09 (WEB+)
March 18-20, 2009: Las Vegas, NV
Now in its fourth year, MIX is a unique technology conference that connects web professionals with industry thought leaders to explore the future of the Web together.  This conference is hosted by Microsoft.  There are usually a few SharePoint Conferences, but you’ll see a lot of other .NET and Social Networking sites.

Microsoft Tech·Ed North America 2009

May 11-15: Los Angeles,  Convention Center

"Seventeenth year as the best technical education and networking event in the industry." 

Tech Ed Global

You can navigate to the other Teched’s through the WW drop down in the corner.  My favorites are South East Asia, NZ, and Australia.

More SharePoint Details Coming soon… TEC – The Experts Conference (Exchange, AD and Identity, Las Vegas – Spring, Berlin – Fall)

Free Conferences SharePoint Saturday and Code Camps:

Virginia Beach SharePoint Saturday 

Jan 10:  Joel Oleson, Michael Lotter, Paul Galvin, Mark Miller (Free community event) – Yep I’ll be there.

NYC SharePoint in the Real World, Imagine Event (SharePoint Saturday)

Jan 21: NYC (Many partners)

Kansas City SharePoint Saturday

Feb 7 – Free event.  Still in the planning stages

South Florida Code Camp

Code Camp is a FREE one day GEEK FEST held on Saturday February 7, 2009

Boise Code Camp

March 28th, 2009

Twin Cities Code Camp

April 4, 2009

Where in the world is Joel?

 

Toronto SharePoint User Group

Dec 12 – Noon Community Luncheon: Spring Rolls on Yonge south of Bloor

Contact Eli for more details

Virginia Beach SharePoint Saturday

Jan 10

I’ll be doing a couple of sessions…

San Diego User Group

Jan ~21- More info TBD

One session likely on legacy migration

SharePoint Best Practices Conference

La Jolla, California – Best Practices US – La Jolla, CA
Feb 1 – Feb 4, 2009
Keynote + a session or two

Sharepoint Connections Spring 2009

Orlando, FL
Mar 22 – Mar 25, 2009

IT Leadership Governance session, plus migration and avoiding failed deployments

European SharePoint Best Practices Conference
London – London, United Kingdom
Apr 6 – Apr 9, 2009
Keynote + a session or two

Tech Ed US – Los Angeles, CA
May 11 – May 15, 2009
In process of submitting sessions.

Trip to the Hospital – Seattle, WA (Baby Due staying home for a few weeks)
May 25 – May 29, 2009

If you are asking if you have one conference you can go to what conference should you go to?  My favorite is Tech Ed for volume and cross coverage, but the new Best Practices Conference (California or Europe) outside of the main Microsoft SharePoint Conference is my recommended focused pick for this year.

If I was in Europe it would be the Best Practices Conference and ITForum/Europe.  In Asia, it would be Tech Ed. 

I plan/hope speak at Tech ED South East Asia 2009, Tech ED Hong Kong 2009, maybe Tech ED South Africa 2009.  Others???

The analysts themselves have many conferences, I’ve found those to be insightful as well.  Gartner’s AIIM, Burton’s, Forresters, IDC, etc…

The WPC is always a big crowd and often ISVs get a chance to do a who’s who and do some serious networking.  That’s usually in the middle of the summer.

Additional Resources:

More Code Camps

Moss Lover: More Free SharePoint Saturdays

User Groups around the world

As you can see there are SharePoint User Groups all over the world see ISPA SharePointPros.org for more info.  Also Culminis has a User Group search by country and language.

In all my work to encourage people to implement best practices, I’ve found that those that say, hey I’ll go with default often find chaos down the road.  The Governance and Deployment checklist I did a while back, as a product manager on the SharePoint team, was designed to help people know what the choices are, and provide awareness to the choices.  Heather Solomon shared her site checklist for new sites.  I hate to hold up a well thought out deployment.  That isn’t my design.  I’m sure that defaults will at least give me something to work with that I can plan and scale later.  Defaults are not best practices by any means.  The Defaults are essentially focused around the least amount of clicks to evaluate the product.

Just look through this list, which is not comprehensive, and you’ll see that the Default settings do definitely have faults.  They are not configured out of the box for a Document Management, Records Management, or ECM system.  They are designed again for an environment to be evaluated and tested, and at a minimum, one that won’t run into pre-configured settings or quotas, but more around optimized performance and prevent people from making the wrong assumptions.

Imagine if when you provisioned your first portal you were limited to a 5GB site collection… The analysts, CMS watch, and all that gang would come down on SharePoint so hard saying it wasn’t a Document Management or viable ECM environment.  Instead, we have to decide what the quotas are for each of our environments and actually configure it.  Same with things like forced check out.  You don’t want that turned on in a collaboration environment, but that’s one of the main reason SharePoint works so well in collab environments, because when you walk through the defaults, most of the compliance type, enforcement features are turned off by default.

There’s a post I did a while back on default installation and configuration settings.  I don’t have a setting by setting configuration for you or a template for your settings, and most of that reason is because it’s so different between environments.  I’d need to know all of the background to give you the site vs. site collection vs. web app and dedicated database recommendations.

If you need more information on sizing of the list, site collection, database storage I did a recent post on resources across those various objects.

Wow, we’ve really got a healthy SharePoint Ecosystem…  This week Quest came out with an update to it’s SharePoint management suite with Quest Site Administrator 3.0.  Which addresses a number of pain points that customers have spoken to Quest about. 

New features include:

Security Explorer – allows the user to search for and modify security on SharePoint servers. This also includes group membership and permission levels management and ability to clone permissions from one user to another.

Permissions Report – Site Administrator for SharePoint comes with a Site Permission report which allows you to view the users and Active Directory groups having access to the site, document library or list, and their permission levels.

I’ve been here at Quest for less than 2 weeks and I’m already impressed by the amount of competition in both the migration, webpart, and management/administration space in the SharePoint ISV partner ecosystem.  I knew there were a lot of players, but having discussions with the teams it is very apparent how often tools for migration come up as well.  Migration continues to be a hot topic as companies try to consolidate their environments and reduce legacy dependencies in an effort to be more agile and compliant.

Other New and Updated Tools

There’s a new version of BDC Meta Man 3.0.0.7 (24th Nov)

I also saw that AvePoint with an announcement of AvePoint Docave 5.1 a significant incremental update from their release in September with 5.0 adding additional migration support, permissions web part that shows permissions in a unique way, and granular restores from SQL.

So what’s the tally up to now with Management tools?  SharePointReviews.com has a good list.

Another tool that should useful in deployment is the newly announced TypeMock Isolator for SharePoint, a product designed for unit testing of SharePoint.  Sounds compelling.  They even built in some incentive (free license) for bloggers to blog about their product in a specific way.  (I’m not doing it right). 🙂

———

As a side note with my employment at Quest, I’ve decided to minimize the amount of blogging I do about Quest specifically and setup a Quest team blog and product blogs.  It’s a project I’ll be pushing for over the next couple of months.  I want to continue to have a fair and balanced blog.