I Love SharePoint – And Here’s Why (Part 2)

By now, regular readers have read my “SharePoint Sucks – And Here’s Why” series that I wrote just prior to SPC09, detailing, and you’re clever enough to deduce this, why I think SharePoint sucks. As was revealed in the final part, however, I don’t hate SharePoint, I love it. Now, it’s time to show you why I love SharePoint.

I’m doing this in step-by-step mode. I’ll tell you, in no particular order, of one thing I absolutely love about SharePoint. I’ll tell you why, and if you disagree, let me know. Send me an email at furuknap<[at]>gmail.com or shoot off a comment to this or any other blog post.

So, without further ado, here’s the second thing I love about SharePoint.

Ready?

You!

I love you because you understand dear
Every single thing I try to do
You’re always there to lend a helping hand dear
I love you most of all because you’re you

With the king’s (I’m talking about Leon Payne here) words in mind, I’d like to draw attention to you, or more precisely the community of which you are a part.

The SharePoint community is absolutely brilliant. The amount of knowledge contained and shared is enormous and people genuinely seems to enjoy working together rather than being king of their own little hills.

Now, when you need to figure out something in SharePoint, you google it, right? You fire off some query and rely on Google to provide you with ignorance relief. In most cases you will likely find the answer right off the bat or at least get hints to where you should search further.

Here’s a thought to consider. It’s not SharePoint that provides you the answers. It is the community. Hundreds and thousands of people have dedicated their time and resources to tell you what you need to know to be a better SharePoint user, administrator, or developer. Even more people have added to the quality of that information with questions and answers.

Take EndUserSharePoint.com, Mark Miller’s project. There is a massive amount of information there that he and his fellow authors share without charging a dime. Granted, he does have several for-pay workshops as well, but he has to make a living too, right? Besides, running a site like that costs money and rather than charge for general access, he’s providing premium content and training for a small fee.

Then, take a look at what Jeremy Thake does with SharePoint Dev Wiki. Out of the goodness of his heart, he’s built a brilliant site that helps developers collaborate on making information available to everyone.

And of course, no tribute to the community is complete without the Danish hero Carsten Keutmann. Through his generous donation of WSPBuilder and SharePoint Manager 2007 (and now SharePoint Manager 2010) Carsten has single-handedly saved SharePoint developers years of development time. I’m serious. Up until I discovered WSPBuilder, I probably spent about twice the amount of time building, deploying, and debugging applications in SharePoint.

However, in addition to these mammoth contributors to the community, I want to commend you. You, the readers and commenters, the question-askers, the (sometimes) complaining and whining crowd, the live-bloggers, the emailers, the forum participants whether you post questions or answers, the bloggers, the tweeters, the webcast authors, the conference or user group speakers…

I’ve had people apologizing for asking questions. Stop that! Not asking questions, but thinking that you are disturbing or asking too much. Through your questions, people can learn, just as I do, every time someone asks something.

Whoever you are, as part of the SharePoint community, silent or audible, you are a great resource, and you are truly valuable.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

.b