I have been following MSDN forums for well over a year (and possibly almost 2 years at this point) and every now and then I hear from someone how “hard” it is to do that. I find it quite easy and thought I’d share my “technique”. This technique also works for www.endusersharepoint.com (http://www.endusersharepoint.com/STP).

Taking MSDN as an example, I first go to standard forum page such as the General Questions for SharePoint main page here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/threads

You should right away notice that the forums are RSS enabled, به عنوان نشان داده شده است:

I’ve been using Google Reader for managing my RSS feeds for a long time now (www.google.com/reader). I go there, add the RSS feed for the forum and now I’m getting all new forums posts via RSS. My Google feeds for SharePoint forums look like this:

Google provides me a nice view of the posting itself:

And finally, Google lets me use the keyboard to scroll through the postings in the forums this way.

I can quickly scan through posts and focus just on those I feel I can make a useful contribution.

Alerts close the loop. Updates to posts don’t come through RSS (though I think they used to a long time ago). اما, if I post a response to a forum posting, the forums alert me via email and IM that someone responded in turn. یا, if I can’t make a useful contribution but I want to know what others have to say, I can drill into it and explicitly request alerts when others do respond.

In an hour or less you can set this process up and and in a week of regular use, learn the various keyboard tricks and shortcuts so that this becomes second nature.

I use the exact same technique for End User SharePoint.Com’s “Stump the Panel” forums. This is their RSS feed: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/STP/rss/.

Forums are an awesome way, possibly the best way short of direct personal experience, of learning the product and getting a nice survey of how the world, at large, uses SharePoint. Give it a try!

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مشترک شدن در وبلاگ من.

من در توییتر در http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

The reason we spend so much time (or should, در هر صورت) working out governance plans is because we want the SharePoint solution to be as effective as possible. We want good infrastructure and rules to keep it humming and safe in case of disaster. We want good security processes to both properly secure the environment but also make it reasonable to manage. We want a good information architecture that will stand the test of time, ideally managing to survive a major organizational change in the company.

To achieve that desirable objective, a governance document and plan can devolve into a bunch of “thou shall” and “thou shall not’s”, همانطور که در:

• Thou shall not create SharePoint security group; use AD instead.
• Thou shall not create folders in document libraries; use content types and views instead.
• Thou shall create all document content types based off a specific custom base type.
• Thou shall not create an information taxonomy based off today’s company org chart.

“Thou shall” and “thou shall not” certainly have their place in the governance plan.

A more successful governance plan will also have a strong marketing angle. It should sell and justify itself to the maximum extent possible. A truly successful governance plan relies upon the voluntary cooperation of all SharePoint users. (There are fringe cases where community cooperation is not needed, such as when SharePoint is used by a very small number of tightly managed users; I’m sure you can think of others). If the user community doesn’t buy into your governance plan then it will be partially successful at best.

I use that word “buy” deliberately. The community will buy the governance plan if it’s fundamentally sound and you go to some effort to sell them on it. Selling leads to marketing and that’s why I think that a governance plan should be considered a marketing plan too. Convince your end users that they need to follow the governance plan and they will voluntarily follow it. If you can get a critical mass of people following the governance plan then the plan’s benefits follow and you’ll have a stronger environment for it.

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مشترک شدن در وبلاگ من.

من در توییتر در http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin