Preparing for the SharePoint Community Advancement Initiative
Note to self: Remember to read Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint before preparing for my exec review of my SharePoint Community Advancement Initiative in the next few weeks. That’s right, I’ve renamed it from “Development” to “Advancement” because quite frankly, that’s what the current community around SharePoint needs since many of the key aspects of community, such as newsgroups, forums, blogs, FAQs, demo sites, user groups, etc. have already been well established.
Based on direct and indirect feedback that I’ve received, I’ve concluded that the advancement that’s most sorely needed is a unified search capability that spans all relevant community content, so users don’t waste time bouncing around different sites looking for answers or contacts. Along with unified search, there needs to be a site registry, which has a workflow enabled process for owners of new community sites to register themselves, for a quick review to be done (perhaps by SharePoint MVPs), and for each approved site to be published to a “What’s New” list (RSS-enabled, of course) for users to easily discover.
Discoverability is another much needed advancement that needs to be done. One way to achieve it is through syndication (via RSS) of content sources that is filtered by popular keywords such as “offline” or “scalability” or “migration.” Another way is through proactive searches where the results are RSS enabled, so the content sources don’t have to be as is the case in the former method. Perhaps the most exciting advancement of all is the ability for members of the community to create a ”personalizable” community portal, so each person can configure exactly how one prefers to search and discover content. Think of it as the Live.com for the SharePoint community!
Separately, there needs to be an easier, cheaper (if not free), and more consistent way for the growing number of SharePoint user groups all over the world to have their own respective web sites that are flexible enough to support the variety of workspaces and information content that each user group needs. Even better would be a seamless and automatic way for a set of user group sites (say, from different cities within the same state or province) to aggregate or cross pollinate content.
I have a few more key features in mind, but I can’t promise that I’ll be able to deliver even half the ones mentioned above due to many dependencies that I have yet to work through. Nevertheless, these are indeed some of the “Pri 1” and “Pri 2” features for which I will be pushing very hard over the course of this calendar year. My overall goal is not only to make the current community infrastructure better but also to ensure that it can scale to support the tremendous number of new members coming into the community over the next couple of years. To that end, I’ve revised my original vision statement just slightly, so it would be less constrained. Therefore, the SharePoint community shall be: A dynamic, self-sustainable, and adaptive gathering place – both online and offline – for people with common interests in SharePoint products and technologies, who aspire to belong, to share, to grow, and to succeed as sales professionals, end-users, developers, administrators, and implementers. If you have significant pain points about the current SharePoint community at large that you don’t feel this initiative will sufficiently address, please let me know directly via e-mail or leave a comment with this blog entry.
