So far, a really good week...

The views and opinions stated in this blog are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Microsoft. Each posting on this blog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.  

What a great week it has been so far, I have to admit, looking back over the past week is inspiring. I have survived two “reductions in force” (Hey, I know I work hard for a living… but anything can happen in these times!) and been witness to one of the first bond offerings in company history. On top of that I resumed several personal projects over the past week. (If you’re really interested head to https://www.azure.net, https://www.soulrevolution.net and https://www.uspsa.org)

I’ve been heads-down busy working on my new MCS engagement, working internally on some upcoming SharePoint guidance materials that hopefully will fill-in the gaps for many customer scenarios and workloads. In fact, we are actively working directly with customers to make certain there are no silos in what we will be shipping out. That’s all I can say at this point on that matter, but the work is really fun and will “hit home” for many SharePoint folks.

I’d like to give a glimpse of one area within our internal SharePoint business. This week, I also became a member of our Information Worker Community Subject Matter Experts for SharePoint. These 50-60 global SMEs work with our Community leadership teams in determining IP focus areas for development. This is our “go-to” group that Information Worker Community leadership uses for driving discussion and thought leadership around broad community topics such as IP, Readiness, Product Group Feedback, and Strategy. Some of the benefits of being active in this community are to have early preview in community opportunities like TAPs, Service Line support, readiness development, Product Group information and event registrations. Ivan Smigoc, one of our smartest and most active SharePoint leads, is the current Director of this group, and he does an amazing job! The members of this group are well-known SharePoint folks, almost all having possessing multiple credentials and far-reaching expertise in SharePoint, including several SharePoint Certified Masters. It is both a privilege and an honor to be able to interact with these folks daily!

OK, well enough about me.. let’s get to the good stuff!

So here are my nuggets for today:

Ø If you haven’t visited Channel 9, you’ve been missing out. In fact, Channel 9 has been on my Visual Studio Start page for many years. I’m a video-learner myself, as many of you folks are as well. Well you can find out more about Jeff Sandquist, our Senior Director of Evangelism at Microsoft, who has been running the Channel 9 developer community for the last five years, over at Vator.tv   www.Vator.tv is near-and-dear to my heart, as it is a startup co-founded by Bambi Francisco, who hails from the same Francisco clan as my beloved wife Cynthia, and is well known to any of you CBS MarketWatch folks.

Ø I enjoyed Woody Windy’s recent blog post about Discovering the Setup User Account - A SharePoint "Whodunit?". In fact, I bookmarked it with my SharePoint bookmarks. Two things I always like to have.. SharePoint bookmarks and my “SharePoint Portable Library”, which is really a collection of ebooks/SDKs etc. I always lug around with me for reference.

Ø I regularly am privy to emails like this one:

“customer is saying they are managing 500,000 plus records and experiencing various issues and are now considering removing MOSS as a content management solution and going with a competitor.”

which pretty much tell me that said customer hasn’t completely done their information architecture homework, or has gotten off-course. (You all know it’s true.) These cases are even more painfully shameful when customers don’t come and ask for help, and just migrate off the platform at significant cost. There certainly are lots of causes for such complaints, but generally I have seen it boil down to a lack of understanding of the platform itself and how to correctly apply an information architecture that manages this for you, instead of attempting to manage problems. For those of you who didn’t read the manual (and I know that’s at least half of you using SharePoint), we have some excellent guidance as to limitations (“software boundaries”) of SharePoint here on TechNet’s SharePoint Server TechCenter. This sits within Planning and Architecture guidance about Infrastructure Planning and Performance/Capacity that is often overlooked and/or misunderstood by customers. It is true you should not have to hire a rocket scientist to run SharePoint, and the product is engineered so you don’t have to. However, large complex problems usually require some reading. J

So that’s about it for now… a “triple treat” for the day. Enjoy!