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Nov
20
SharePoint Noise Reduction Filter
Microsoft initially took a lot of heat because of the lack of documentation for SharePoint 2007. That’s one of the reasons EndUserSharePoint.com was started. I was having to discover things on my own and wanted to make those discoveries available for others who were flailing with how this beast works.
Now that the platform has been around for a couple years, there’s tons of material to play with… on the Microsoft site, on blogs, through podcasts, through live online demos, through SharePoint Saturdays… you name the medium and SharePoint will be in it.
It really has changed how I view the purpose of EndUserSharePoint. Yes, we’re still providing articles for the Power Users who need solutions to everyday business problems. A great example is what Jim Bob Howard and Christophe Humbert updated on the site yesterday: SharePoint Color Coded Calendar – PayRoll Schedule.
This is the type of content we’ve become known for. The concept behind that is based upon my years as a trainer. We need to provide solutions based content, solutions based upon real world business problems, to help people visualize what they can do within their own environment. This is all well and good, but EndUserSharePoint.com has another purpose as SharePoint documentation becomes more prevalent.
“People are looking for filters to get the highest quality content they can.” — Ron Bloom, CEO of PodCast Network
With so much content available now, especially that coming out about 2010, how are you going to keep up? How are you going to know what’s worth looking at vs a thinly veiled marketing pitch for a third party product?
That’s where we come in. Natasha and I are in the process of setting up the feed reader and Google Alerts so that we can scour the net for the latest and greatest homegrown solutions people are generating with SharePoint. We are constantly tracking twitter, checking out all of the recommending reading on SharePoint. We’ve got an eye on projects like TunnelPoint, jPoint, the jQuery library for SharePoint Web Services, as well as solutions provided by Peter Allen from Bits of SharePoint and Christophe Humbert from Path to SharePoint, and all the SharePoint Saturdays happening around the world.
Each of these sites provide solutions or information that can be utilized without accessing the server. That’s our mantra now: “No server. No deployment. No programming. No development“. The solutions we are looking for should be able to be implemented by anyone with Site Admin permission level. We are going to try and act as your “Noise Reduction Filter” when it comes to SharePoint solutions content.
Along these lines, within the next few weeks you’ll be seeing some tweaks to the site. We’re implementing a SharePoint Community Calendar where anyone who is giving a SharePoint event can post the information. We’re building a demo library in a public MOSS site where you can test drive all of the solutions we will be providing in the site and in our live workshops. (I would be remiss if I didn’t say thanks to fpWeb.net for hosting the MOSS site for our demos and SharePoint Community Calendar.) We’re going to continue with the recorded interview series I started with Joel Oleson and Michael Gannotti, Today in SharePoint.
It has gotten to the point where I can barely keep up with providing my own solutions while working with others to expose theirs. It’s now about community involvement, more than the personal solutions I can provided.
The site is evolving. I hope you’ll stay with us as we transition to a new source of content flow from the entire End User SharePoint Community. I look forward to hearing from you, with your recommendations for solutions people are providing.
Sincere Regards,
Mark Miller, Founder and Editor
EndUserSharePoint.com
I’m more of a “lurker” as I try out the basics in SP 2007, and am a daily visitor to your RSS feed. I applaud what this site does for the End User, and look forward to the coming years. In the meantime, I hope there’ll be a prominent spot on EUSP for SP 2007 topics for a couple more years; I expect we’ll be using it for at least that long before we upgrade.
It may be because it’s new, but all I read now in the RSS feeds is about SP 2010. It’s like SP 2007 has been thrown on the trash heap. But there’s plenty of folks like me (I assume) that aren’t ready to upgrade.
Anyway, thanks to all the contributors, and to you, Mark, for this site!
[...] a follow-up to this morning’s article, SharePoint Noise Reduction Filter, I’ve setup an anonymous poll to get feedback on the type of content you’d like to see [...]
Like the clear direction you have proposed here Mark. Should really help new people understand what content is contained in the site and new content that comes onto it.
Personally I think this sort of description/vision might be helpful to new people if it was in an ABOUT section or something similar for EUSP. What do you think?
Richard Harbridge
[...] just as I published an article, SharePoint Noise Reduction Filter, on using EndUserSharePoint.com to filter out noise on SharePoint, the TechCrunch Crunchup [...]
I think your right. Things are getting a bit out of hand, there was a time when the current SharePoint community model worked, I think we are due a new one. I suppose it will just evolve tho, you build up your reliable sources as you go on. I hope it still stands that if you build good content people will come. I’d still go for quality over quantity. I do agree there needs to be separate streams for different audiences.
Mark, as a typical power user with responsibility to my work team for solutions but only site admin access, I wanted to thank you for your championing of the OOTB solutions, tricks, workarounds, and ingenious tweaks. From that solid base it’s useful to venture out into the more exotic realms. Thanks to you and your guests for the fantastic tutorials.
I love the mantra, and think you should highlight it in big, friendly letters.
One of the types of things that I continue to see a need for are really good introductory tutorials or “howtos” that delve into interfacing SharePoint to external needs. For instance, many companies have data that has to remain in mysql/postgres/sqlite/oracle and other databases. But they also have a need to access that data. When an end user of sharepoint needs to do that sort of thing, they find the petabytes of returns by most web search engines to be overwhelming, and yet, as the information begins to be evaluated, it turns out that much of it is what I call “glossy-speak”. Things like “Oh yes, you can get (or update) that sort of data by writing a blah blah blah mumble mumble mumble”. Yet, if you ask “okay, how does one write such a thing” the response is generally the electronic equivalent of a shrug…
Erin,
No server.
No deployment.
No programming.
No development.
Mark