Records Management Team Blog and "customer evidence"
My work on the SharePoint Community Advancement Initiative continues at a dizzing pace. Earlier this week, I helped launch the Records Management Team Blog, which is a blog about the business challenges we are all facing and the opportunities to address these challenges using technology, as we encounter the problems of records keeping, planning, retention, disposition, litigation response, holds, and so on. And I’m working with a couple of other teams to implement blogs for Enterprise Search and a very cool add-on technology to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in the coming months.
Separately, we continue to receive tremendously positive feedback via the SharePoint Team Blog that went live just a few months ago. Within the Product Management Group, we spent a lot of time, energy, and money developing so-called “customer evidence” that showcase how people are leveraging SharePoint Products and Technologies to achieve their goals, so it’s especially gratifying to see voluntary testimonials about SharePoint such as this one from the Christian Aid organization in the UK, which describes how SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is “enabling the Christian Aid staff to view and contribute to the same information; be they here in head office, in a church building, out in a developing country, or on an international flight.”
My favorite excerpt from the blog entry referenced above is:
“Using a Microsoft product means that we are buying into a system that requires no bespoke development from us and, more importantly, does not require rare and expensive open source guru's to maintain it. We can configure the software quickly - the SharePoint go live took four months from a standing start - and avoid the lengthy development cycles of open source. What's more, our staff get to work with a familiar interface… so the training burden is low.”
