Or should I continue to push them out of their comfort zones into a brighter, bolder SharePoint world?

I created the SharePoint Maturity Model to apply a holistic view to a SharePoint implementation, and to bring standardization to the conversation around functionality, best practices, and improvement.

Actually, it explains a lot about why SharePoint can be a tricky product to get right. To see why, let’s take a memetic view of organisational life.

Visualising problems is one of the areas we discuss in our book exclusively for readers of EndUserSharePoint.com.

I get the question wherever I go, “You speak at a lot of conferences. Which one should I attend?” Instead of me trying to give a specific answer to a question like that, let’s let the conference organizers tell you why they created their conference.

SharePoint consists of several elements that provide for the creation, management, presentation, and disposition of information involved in an organization’s operations. One such element, the SharePoint List, is oh-so-simple, yet so incredibly important and powerful. Here are a quick set of best practices for the creation and management of lists that will provide for the definition, capture, and sharing of your desired groupings of information.

Todd Bleeker gave an extended presentation at Best Practices Conference this week on “Best Practices for Developing SharePoint Web Parts”. I slapped together a quick down and dirty web cam recording with UStream, embedded below.
Todd was kind enough to send me the entire slidedeck along with the resources from his presentation. Crank up the recording [...]

I’ve many customers that struggle with implementation and support of best practices because of organizational politics, budget constraints, and culture. While most of the SharePoint administrators and developers I work with want to implement best practices, they face impediments and many times just give up. When this happens, one of two outcomes is often the case:

With Mark Miller as the host, Laura Rogers will demonstrate just how flexible and useful the Out-of-the-Box Web Parts are in MOSS. She will take a detailed look at the Filter, KPI, Excel Web Access, Outlook Web Access, Business Data Catalog, and Data View Web Parts. She will then look at how to customize some of these web parts using SharePoint Designer while still adhering to the Industry Best Practices. All of this is done without using any code. This session in itself is a best practice, because it is best to learn what SharePoint can do out-of-the-box, before writing any code.

With the increasing number of SharePoint conferences, you might be asking yourself “Why would I attend the Best Practices® Conference?” In this post, I’d like to answer that question.