Using the Community

One of the things I have learned in my travels here has been that you can find almost anything if you are savvy enough with a search engine such as Bing. Part of my job here is to create and maintain a KPI Indicator in SharePoint 2007 to show the relative health of the MSDN Forums that I manage. I told you about the re-org that happened, so now I have inherited a few more Forums, and there is another SharePoint site to create a new KPI Indicator for. Easy, right? Well, this is software, so nothing ever seems to be as easy as you would like it.

The new site is SharePoint 2010, which is fine, except that there is now no such thing as a KPI Indicator WebPart in SharePoint 2010. They are nice enough to tell you in the help files that this control is now called a SharePoint Status Indicator (the Help topic is also helpfully titled “What Happened to SharePoint 2007 KPIs, it was easy to find), and outline some of the cool new stuff this will do. That’s great, but I could not find anything there as to how to actually use this little puppy, which seems a very handy WebPart, and the subject of another post at some point when I get further along the road with this project.

Here comes the community part – a quick search in Bing (and yes, I am a Search Engine Bigot, and surprisingly not because of where I work – yet another topic for a later post!), and I was able to find an MVP (Rehman Gul) that had this on his site. As Rehman is an MVP, I know I can trust the information – did I mention that I worked for the MVP Program for 7 years? So, in a few short minutes, I was able to complete my task using the information I gathered from a help file and a quick search, and isn’t that what it is all about these days?

I know this is likely obvious to many of you, but this is the “Getting Started” blog, so I put it down her anyway in the hopes that it will help someone out. It sure helped me do a task that I was unfamiliar with quickly and correctly, it made the bosses happy, and I was able to go home on time, which made everything on the home front much better too. So, I guess the moral of the story is that before asking in a Forum, calling a buddy, etc., try finding the answer yourself, and don’t limit yourself to just one source. There is a world of information out there!