I was lucky to attend and present at last week’s SharePoint Best Practices conference. I’m still new to the whole speaking "thing" agus, frankly, 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 (nach neamhaird mé iad). Ina áit sin, Dhírigh mé beagán níos mó ar an lucht freastail.
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, ach is dóigh liom go raibh sé ar a laghad 60% dírithe ar shaincheisteanna neamh-dev, 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 (ag anois, curtha ar bun go han-mhaith).
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.
Ag rá go bhfuil, 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, oiliúint, riachtanais a bhailiú, cuardaigh, Forbairt, ailtireacht faisnéise, etc. I think that the missed opportunity has to do with the "green field" boinn tuisceana go leor de na cleachtais is fearr.
Nuair a labhairt linn faoi úrnua, 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, ailtireacht faisnéise, etc. Mar sin féin … cad a tharlaíonn nuair a bhíonn tú cheana féin i dtáirgeadh le roinnt mílte úsáideoirí (or 10’s of thousands) agus nach raibh tú a leanúint na cleachtais is fearr ag an tús? I’ve seen companies with … ahem … an- corr information architecture baked into their environment. I don’t think that this conference provided much guidance for organizations with that kind of problem (agus ní féidir liom a chiallaíonn go díreach IA, ach rialachas, cuardaigh, go leor réimsí eile). Ar ndóigh,, Tá a fhios agam tá fadhb agat le cuid mhór den réiteach agus go bhfuil an-luachmhar.
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. Mar sin féin, 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" agus riachtanais an phobail chun aghaidh a thabhairt air ceann ar.
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, etc.
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