I was lucky to attend and present at last week’s SharePoint Best Practices conference. I’m still new to the whole speaking "thing" en, eerlik, I was a bit nervous for the first half while I sweated out waiting to speak myself. That sort of nervous feeling made it a little hard for me to pay attention to the presenters (nie dat ek dit geïgnoreer). In plaas daarvan, Ek gefokus op die deelnemers 'n bietjie meer.

Conferences always set my mind racing and there was a lot take in at this one. This conference was excellent. I think it was unusual in several ways. It wasn’t a heavy developer conference. There were certainly dev parts to it, maar ek dink dit was ten minste 60% gefokus op die nie-dev kwessies, maybe as high as 80%. I think that speaks to the evolving nature of the SharePoint market. Companies are implementing SharePoint in a variety of ways and they are looking for guidance on how to do it right. And not just guidance on how to create features/solutions (wat nou, is baie goed gevestigde).

I believe the conference was tremendously valuable to most everyone that attended and I know that the organizers plan to do the conference again early next year.

Noudat dit gesê is, I believe there was a missed opportunity which I hope the next conference addresses. I say it’s a missed opportunity, but that’s not a bad thing. Discovering a community need is in and of itself a good thing. The conference discussed a number of best practices in a variety of areas such as governance, opleiding, vereistes byeenkoms, soek, ontwikkeling, inligting argitektuur, ens.. I think that the missed opportunity has to do with the "green field" aannames onderliggend aan baie van die beste praktyke.

Wanneer ons praat oor 'n groen veld, we mean that SharePoint hasn’t gone into production and we’re starting with a clean slate. This is ideal because you can start straight away using best practices for defining and managing governance, inligting argitektuur, ens.. Egter … wat gebeur as jy reeds in die produksie met 'n paar duisend gebruikers (or 10’s of thousands) en julle het nie die beste praktyke aan die begin? I’ve seen companies with … Ahem … 'n baie vreemd information architecture baked into their environment. I don’t think that this conference provided much guidance for organizations with that kind of problem (en ek bedoel nie net IA, maar bestuur, soek, baie ander gebiede). Natuurlik, weet jy het 'n probleem is 'n groot deel van die oplossing en dit is baie waardevol.

I think that the online SharePoint community hasn’t done much to address this either. I know I have not. It’s a very hard problem to solve at many levels. Technically it’s hard. Budget-wise it’s hard. Culturally, it’s hard. Egter, it’s probably a bigger real world problem than most. Since the conference ended, I’ve been thinking about these kinds of problems and how one would solve them. There has to be a better answer than, "Verwyder en weer" en die gemeenskap moet dit hoof te bied.

I think that this a great opportunity for the blogging community and experienced thought leaders to lay out some guidance on how to repair their environments. I think there’s a small but non-zero risk that SharePoint could end up with a bad and enduring reputation as a result of poorly architected implementations that fail due to poor governance, IA, ens..

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