I was lucky to attend and present at last week’s SharePoint Best Practices conference. I’m still new to the whole speaking "thing" і, адкрыта, 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 (Не тое каб я іх ігнараваў). Замест, Я засяродзіўся трохі больш на ўдзельнікаў.
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, але я думаю, што гэта было па меншай меры 60% сканцэнтравана на не-DEV пытанні, 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 (which by now, has been very well established).
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.
Having said that, 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, навучанне, збор патрабаванняў, пошук, развіццё, Інфармацыйная архітэктура, і г.д.. I think that the missed opportunity has to do with the "green field" здагадкі, якія ляжаць у аснове многіх з лепшых практык.
Калі мы гаворым пра зялёным полі, 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, Інфармацыйная архітэктура, і г.д.. Аднак … што адбываецца, калі вы ўжо ў вытворчасці з некалькімі тысячамі карыстальнікаў (or 10’s of thousands) і вы не прытрымлівацца парад і рэкамендацый у пачатку? I’ve seen companies with … гм … вельмі няцотны information architecture baked into their environment. I don’t think that this conference provided much guidance for organizations with that kind of problem (і я не маю на ўвазе І.А., але кіраванне, пошук, многіх іншых галінах). Вядома, ведаючы, у вас ёсць праблема вялікая частка рашэння, і гэта вельмі каштоўна.
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. Аднак, 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, "uninstall and reinstall" і супольнасць павінна вырашаць яе галаву.
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, Аёва, і г.д..
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