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After the NYC SPUG meeting last night, I had dinner with Inna Gordin, idea meister behind SharePointReviews.com and SharePointAds.com. We had a lengthy discussion about what it takes to get exposure for an idea in the SharePoint Community, exposure broad enough that it becomes viral and can really have an influence.

Inna has setup an incredibly useful resource for the SharePoint Community: a site that has unbiased, community generated reviews for SharePoint companies, products and services. The problem is, how many of you have ever utilized it?

That’s what I thought…

The site has over 500 SharePoint products and services listed. Each item has a description and an “Add New Review” button, giving the community the ability to comment and review each of the items. You can check out the reviews from people talking about the live online workshops at EndUserSharePoint.com, if you want to get a feel for the interface and how it works. There are 19 training companies listed, so you can compare us against all of the other vendors listed. Where else are you going to find all of this information listed under one umbrella?

The core problem with SharePointReviews, as I see it, is that when you are looking for the information on SharePoint products, how are you going to remember the site? What’s going to trigger your memory when you are looking for a specific type of third party solution… “Oh yeh, I almost forgot. Let me check out SharePoint Reviews to see if they have anything on Project Management in SharePoint.”

I read an article once about the most successful used car salesman in the United States. Before the internet and the ability to mass spam anyone you could get your hands on, this guy built a mailing list of over 74,000 people. Not an email list, a REAL mailing list. He mailed a postcard to everyone on that list once a month because he never knew when someone was going to need a new car.

So what’s missing here? What’s missing with SharePoint Reviews? Seems pretty obvious to me if you use the example above. They need a simple opt in SharePoint Reviews Weekly Newsletter so that once a week Inna can send you a short list of the new products and services that were added that week. As the mailing gets more refined, you could even select specific categories of information that you are interested in. In my case, I want to know about any new SharePoint Training Companies that come on board specializing in End User training.

There’s also an ulterior motive for me, of course. I want it to work so I can use it when I’m doing research on products and vendors. When EndUserSharePoint.com is writing an article, I don’t want to have to go and get all the fluff press articles from the vendor site. I want real world context from people who have used the services. I want to hear about the warts as well as the roses. That way, the community can maintain its own sense of integrity by supporting those vendors who deserve it.

As I said, I think SharePointReviews.com is providing a potentially invaluable service to the community, but if the community doesn’t participate, it’s all for naught.

I want to get the ball rolling. Please take a moment and look through the listings at SharePointReviews.com and add a review or two. To show your support, put the SharePointReviews badge on your site for the next week and help Inna reach the broadest audience she can. It’s simple. It helps you. It helps me. It costs nothing. That’s what the community is about, right?

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