(Part 2 in my series of “I hate SharePoint, and why every business should use it”)

Oh no you didn’t! You didn’t just compare my business application to a common STD often called “the great imitator” because it’s many features and functions are often indistinguishable from other products!    I have to say, this is by far the PERFECT anecdote! (I’ve referenced SharePoint in this way in the past in my talks.. but never before did I have this VERBATIM and slightly modified caption from the CDC Website on STD Facts)  So, let’s take a journey, slightly modifying and replacing a few words in this description of What is the Treatment

SharePoint is easy to cure in its early stages. A single injection of planning and training will cure a business who has had SharePoint for less than a year. Additional doses are needed to treat someone who has had SharePoint for longer than a year. For people who are allergic to planning, other forms of project management are available to treat SharePoint. There are no home remedies or over-the-counter solutions that will cure SharePoint. Treatment will kill the SharePoint sprawl and prevent further damage, but it will not repair damage already done.

Because effective treatment is available, it is important that persons be screened for SharePoint on an on-going basis if their legacy behaviors put them at risk for STD’s (SharePoint Team Deployments)

Persons who receive SharePoint treatment must abstain from sprawl with new partners until the SharePoint sores are completely healed. Persons with SharePoint must notify their partners so that they also can be tested and receive treatment if necessary.

As you can tell if you read the original sourced location, NOT A WHOLE LOT CHANGED! But this says SO MUCH for this STD and the SharePoint community as a whole!

If you’ve ever suffered through sprawl, be it SharePoint, Exchange, Notes, or Wiki-sprawl you know exactly what I’m talking about.    I cannot emphasize enough how beneficial planning is, but this is not for naught!   Just because you built a legacy infrastructure whereby your sprawl has left you almost crippled does not mean you have no recourse or option to turn this around.    These lessons learned and best practices from Microsoft’s own Internal IT on what they did to get from where they ‘were’ to where they are today on 2010 is an eye-opener and a must check out!

Some of the best lessons I took away from these sessions (and more which I’m not referring to here) is I get it that you have a war-torn SharePoint environment which was created potentially years ago with bad patterns, practices and little strategy, direction or vision.   Guess what?  I don’t care!  I don’t care about yester-year, I care about the future; and the strategy for the future is… Build for tomorrow, and migrate yesterday; Don’t try to migrate yesterday in ORDER to build for tomorrow.   Is it possible? Yes.  Is it enjoyable? NO!   SharePoint easily migrates and data can shift and move far easier than other platforms.   You DO HAVE OPTIONS! Take advantage of them, but don’t try and cripple yourself attempting to fix your SharePoint 2003 environment so you can TRY to migrate to 2010.    Deploy 2010, get it the way you want, establish governance, proper practices, avoid the sprawl and migrate IN to it; don’t try to do this backwards – You don’t have to!

Oh, and get regular check-ups, you never know what your Partner has been getting in to. :)

Resources in this article from:

• Microsoft IT: How MSIT Upgraded Microsoft to SharePoint 2010

• Information Governance for Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Let me start off with a shout-out to every SharePoint Zealot out there who is going to seethe, scream and yell at the very presence of this topic; who will vehemently disagree with me before they even take the moment to disregard and throw away this article, because frankly they don’t need to read it at all!  (Hi guys! :))  And for the rest of you, allow me to give you a journey in to some of the reasons I absolutely hands down DESPISE SharePoint; Oh did I mention that is also WHY you should not only be considering if, but be deploying it full-scale to take your business in that next direction?  K, glad we got that out of the way!

Disclaimer: The following is a breakdown of entirely non-sarcastic statements with core sound, business and technical justifications of just why SharePoint is the flaming pile of destructive pleasure that it is and will continue to be part of your organizations ecosystem from this point forward.    If you disagree, agree or are a contrarian this is the post for you!

Follow-up Disclaimer: I’ve decided to release this as a series instead of one really long blog post you likely won’t even read in the first place, so feel free to follow the entire series of why I hate sharepoint and why you should use it! :)

• SharePoint is where you put your data if you never want anyone to find it

• SharePoint is Viral in Nature, just implement it and it’ll spread! (like Syphilis)

(Part 1 in my series of “I hate SharePoint, and why every business should use it”)

Have you ever heard this statement before? I know I have, in fact I have lived it countless times in my life going back to the earliest versions of WSS and SharePoint Services ever since Microsoft made this available.    And is that story true today even? Sure; out of context definitely.     If you continue to do exactly what you are doing today, change nothing and start to leverage SharePoint the same way you are using File Services you will experience the same benefit and value of a pool of data to lose things in.   However, SharePoint changes things ever so slightly and for the better by introducing the concept of ‘metadata’ to your otherwise unstructured datasets.    Yea we’ve all heard of metadata, it’s where two bits go to get a byte (Wow, I can’t believe I just made that terrible joke!)   But it is so much more than that.    Unstructured content combined with Metadata, toss a little search services in there and all of a sudden you have the ability to not simply ‘find your data’ when looking for it, but you can go to the extents of searching across an enterprise and making the data available and extensible to an audience far greater than your own.

So rather than simply managing lots of silo’s – Be it SharePoint Servers, File Shares, EMC Documentum, MORE Websites, Notes Servers, Exchange data, external sources, and an infinite number of other resources you’d otherwise be managing individually and be unable to find things – SharePoint changes your game a bit by making them all consumable in one “Pane of Glass” instead of lots of individual “Pains of glAss” :)  

So, if you want to ensure no-one ever finds your data, I highly encourage you to put it into a file share, into SharePoint, into a random Wiki you manage and maintain internally; but regardless of where you put it, you can use this tool to ensure that your data is not only indexed, referenced and accessible, but you can continue what you’re doing today in a more efficient and accessible manner so as to flatten the enterprise down to a level at which even localization can come to grips with and understand.

Resources in this article from:

• Customizing Microsoft FAST …Customizing Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

• Getting to know FAST Search …Getting to know FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010

I feel like Alex Russo in that episode of “Wizards of Waverly place” talking about the lame DJ who made that song “wiki-wiki-pedia!” but no, this is not only NOT LAME, it’s complete rock star, and champion some might say! (I might say!)

So, what’s the big deal about the TechNet Wiki? I mean, we have other Wiki’s out there right? so obviously it must be the same! (it is not!)

Cool Features in the TechNet Wiki Beta!

• The ability to create content that you feel really need to exist when it doesn’t
• The ability to SEARCH for CONTENT (indexed in your favorite search engine without login… so no need to login/etc) and thus determine whether you need to create new content
• Integration with your LiveID so there’s no need to manage and maintain yet ANOTHER acct in order to do things – That’s something you can write home about!
• Forums! Forums! Forums! (Yea, that feature has existed… but it’s EASY to get to using this vehicle!)

And I’m sure there are other reasons to use it, but if there is one thing I can encourage you to do now, instead of waiting for it… Just go Check it out!

Do it! (Do It! :))   It may be something helpful which will change your life, and if not.. at least you can feel well knowing that Microsoft has adopted a Wiki architecture to enable you (the community) to express and move forward with doing things! :)

So, get out there and wiki-wiki your wiki on!

Yea I think that’s pretty clear in the title though I think it bears repeating!

This years TechEd North America will be hosted in none other than New Orleans, LA! – Which frankly is a GREAT city to host a TechEd in (I went ~10 years ago in NOLA – Good times!)

What this year does have on track for those of you looking to attend are – talking points and ways to convince your boss!

This actually takes you to a web-form which will generate off an email and send it to your boss :)

Now from a personal perspective, the benefit and value of this promotion is pretty severe.  I attended TechEd NA 2009 (Maybe you met me! I personally talked to ~3000 people!) And with that said, the attendance was dismal as far as I was concerned! Not to mention there was a great imbalance of Developers compared to IT Pro’s!    So the value of convincing your boss is and should be very important – considering the fact that VMWorld had 3-4x the number of participants yet worldwide FAR more people work within the space of Microsoft Technologies (Hey, I love VMware too, but you’d think we’d atleast get a decent attendance!)

I’ll be ‘convincing’ my boss, and so should you!   So, I’ll see you at TechEd (By hook or by crook :)) And what better time to convince than when you can save $300! :)