If you follow EndUserSharePoint.com on a regular basis, you know that we are in the process of reorganizing the site to make it more useable, more flexible, in the way that you can find information. As I thought through how I’d like to reorganize the site, it became apparent that my dilemma wasn’t a unique one.

The SharePoint Community in general is so wide and so diverse, it is difficult to create a simple way to organize information across different types of SharePoint sites. The SharePoint audience is maturing, making it necessary to provide content that crosses the boundaries between SharePoint End User, IT Pro and Developer.

IT Pro and Developer content is not appropriate for EndUserSharePoint.com content. There has to be some way to keep the original purpose and focus of EUSP while providing other types of SharePoint resources for a maturing audience. From this realization came the kernel of an idea for a reorganization of community, not just the site.

The SharePoint Community: End User, IT Pro, Developer

Joel Oleson (SharePointJoel.com), Jeremy Thake (SharePointDevWiki.com) and I (EndUserSharePoint.com) are working together on a new vision for a SharePoint Community site.

For the past few months, we have been working with Marcy Keller (The SharePoint Muse) to build a SharePoint 2010 site that will house all of our content under one roof: End User, IT Pro and Developer. By combining resources, we will be able to provide content across the entire spectrum of SharePoint users.

Today, Joel, Jeremy and I are announcing that our concept is quickly becoming reality. We’d like to let you in on the process, where we are in the implementation and how you can plan on participating.

Infrastructure

The combined sites are housed on a 2010 platform provided by fpWeb.net. The team at Metalogix wrote a migration engine for us that moves content from the EndUserSharePoint.com WordPress blog into 2010 publishing pages, and associates the existing comments with each article. The Metalogix app has also made it possible to migrate from Jeremy’s Confluence wiki site into a SharePoint wiki.

Each of the content areas (End User, IT Pro and Developer) resides in its own site collection on a multi-server farm on fpWeb. This segregation of areas makes it possible for various user levels to find appropriate content without having to sift through articles and resources not of interest.

The entrance of the site is a magazine style aggregator that combines content from all three areas content areas. When a reader clicks on an article or resource, they are moved into the area from which that content comes from.

What Happens to Our Existing Sites

A major point of discussion between us was “What do we do with our existing sites?” Should they be deleted after migration to avoid confusion? This didn’t seem like the best solution since one of the major drawing cards for each of our sites is the amount of “Google Juice” they have gathered over the years, plus the number of RSS feeds and hardcoded links that point to existing content would become broken.

We decided the existing sites will not go away, they will be archived. EndUserSharePoint.com and SharePointJoel.com will still exist in their current domains at RackSpace, but will be locked down from accepting comments and new content. The content and location will still exist, but point to the new community site for participation in comments and authoring of new articles.

Creation of New Content

EndUserSharePoint.com uses many authors to provide a daily flow of articles. Joel recently wrote an article, What’s Up in SharePoint Land, complimenting me on the community model of content creation that we use on EndUserSharePoint.com. Community generated content makes it possible to have a wide diversity of topics on the site. It lets us expand into new areas such as Business Process Management and Social Community Building within SharePoint without losing focus on the End User.

With the new community site, we are making this a formal process within all three content areas. Each content provider will have its own dedicated authors.
 
I have put together a team of authors who will be providing content exclusively for EUSP. Each has a specific area of expertise that, when added to the mix, creates a much more comprehensive whole. In a follow up article, I will introduce you to each of the twelve authors who will provide articles and resources for EndUserSharePoint’s area of the site.

How You Can Participate

Many people have become part of the EndUserSharePoint .com community by providing us with articles about projects they have worked on or ideas they have come up with. We have over 70 people who have provided content on the site. Our policy is that we are open to looking at any article that might be appropriate for the SharePoint Community. Now with IT Pro handled by Joel and Developer content handled by Jeremy, we won’t have to turn down articles because they aren’t appropriate for End Users! We can just push them over to the other areas.

In addition to contributing articles, there are other ways you might consider participating in the community.

Stump the Panel: SharePoint Q&A is an incredible resource for End Users of SharePoint. The team of people providing answers on a daily basis has made it one of the most useful areas of the site. Even if you don’t want to answer questions yet, checking in on a regular basis will give you visibility into common problems site managers and site collections managers are dealing with. There are also forums for specific types of content such as the solutions provided by Christophe Humbert and Marc Anderson.

Ken Price is working with us to organize and coordinate a SharePoint Web Parts Wiki. We are creating an area where every web part will be documented by the community. This includes what versions of SharePoint a web part exists in, how it is used and configured, and uses cases provided by anyone who has used the web part. Ken will be moderating the content to make sure no comment spam is getting through, but we’re going to open this up so that anyone that wants to participate can help build it out.

The SharePoint Community Calendar is expanding to hold not just SharePoint events, but a comprehensive list of SharePoint User Groups around the world. One of the most used areas of the calendar is for tracking down User Group events. By having a list of the user groups listed and pointing to their sites, we can now integrate that information into the events calendar. Natasha Felshman is keeping track of all the information and updating it on a daily basis so that it doesn’t become stale and out of date.

Conclusion

Joel, Jeremy and I are extremely excited about combining our existing sites and expanding them into a much larger community effort. We sincerely hope you will join us as the community site becomes a reality in the near future. Joel (SharePointJoel.com) and Jeremy (SharePointDevWiki.com) are posting articles on their sites to explain their vision of the new community, too.

You can keep up with our progress on either of the current sites: EndUserSharePoint.com, SharePointJoel.com, SharePointDevWiki.com. We will be watching for your comments, suggestions and participation since this is an ever changing project as the SharePoint Community grows, morphs and matures into something that was never imagined at the beginning our journey.

Thanks for staying with us.

Mark Miller
Founder and Editor
EndUserSharePoint.com