Spotlight on Jeff Webb, SharePoint Rock Star

Jeff Webb, in addition to being the author of Essential SharePoint 2007 from O'Reilly Media, is the author of numerous other programming books, as well as a blogger in the SharePoint ecosystem. With his company Wombat Technology, Webb is primarily a sought-after SharePoint consultant and trainer, and he has directly translated that experience into authoring and hosting CD/DVD-ROM course on SharePoint for Administrators for AppDev.  Additionally, Webb maintains multiple SharePoint domains, Essential SharePoint and SharePoint Workshop among them.  A member of Bamboo's Technical Advisory Board, Webb was an original member of Microsoft's Visual Basic team.  We touch on all of these topics in our freewheeling interview. 

After having been relatively quiet in the space for some time, you've recently become active again in the SharePoint blogosphere with your Essential SharePoint blog.  Was there any particular trigger that prompted your return to regular blogging? 

Really, I've just been a bit scattered over the years. I restarted the Essential SharePoint blog to support some training I've been presenting. If I'm developing software, I'll be active in a newsgroup related to the project because I can ask as well as answer questions in that format. And if I'm working on a new book, you won't hear from me for three to six months because that's enough writing during the day!

How are you enjoying flexing those blogging muscles again?

I love writing, but I worry about sounding like "Mr. Know-It All". I think it's important to separate fact from opinion -- blogs can fall down in that area, perhaps because they don't get edited the way a book does. So, I've been trying to report from the field as much as possible: what works, what doesn't, any tips or tricks I've learned, but every once in a while I'll still write something a little off-topic like Googlenomics or The Eye of the Ezel.

I love the "Ask Jeff" feature that you began on Using SharePoint, and that you're continuing on Essential SharePoint.  The notion that a SharePoint expert at your level is essentially putting yourself out there publicly as SharePoint's one-man answer to Ask Jeeves is most commendable.  As the community of SharePoint users continues to grow, do you have any concerns about Ask Jeff blowing up and getting too big for you to handle on your own?

Thanks! I try to provide a space for readers to ask questions. You don't have to buy one of my books to ask a question on Ask Jeff, but if the answer is in my book I'll usually just reference the page - if nothing else it makes it easy to find the answer at B&N the next time you stop for coffee! Folks are amazingly nice when they post a question, so I enjoy that. I hope the SharePoint community gets too big for me to handle. That would be great!

Speaking of Using SharePoint, would it be fair to say that that site ultimately evolved into what you're doing now with Essential SharePoint?

The Using SharePoint site was for the first edition of the Essential SharePoint book - that's actually what I wanted to call the book, but O'Reilly had other plans. The first edition covered WSS 2.0, which some folks are only now transitioning off of so I left the site up and started the Essential SharePoint site for the 2007 edition of my book. I had to do things that way because for a time I had both WSS 2.0 and WSS 3.0 running on my server. Doing those site migrations was very instructive and I wound up doing a lot of migrations for other folks and ultimately I wrote all that up in the SharePoint Administration course for AppDev.

Now, I've kind of got too many domains... Nah, you can never have too many domains! 

In addition to Essential SharePoint, you also recently launched the SharePoint Workshop site, choosing to employ the wiki functionality of SharePoint to deliver the majority of the content.  It's a bold choice to present workshop-style information in a collaborative online medium such as wikis.  Has that decision presented any particular challenges? 

I started out trying to use the Community Kit for SharePoint but quickly figured out that I would have to become a CKS-expert, and I just didn't have time. I know the out-of-the-box SharePoint features, I know Bamboo's stuff, and I have my own tools, so a plain-Jane SharePoint Wiki was the best choice for me. I'll tackle CKS at some point in the future.

A couple nice things about Wikis, though: the content is easy to edit and maintain, and you can add web parts to the bottom of the page. Ultimately, I'll have to create some new master page layouts so I can put the dynamic content somewhere besides the bottom, but that can wait.

How would you describe the different goals of Essential SharePoint and the SharePoint Workshop?

The Essential SharePoint site supports my book and products. It's really all about me. SharePoint Workshop is a directory of SharePoint add-ins (Web Parts, solutions, bundles) and services such as consultants. It's really about everyone else - I'm just the editor, and I have some help from Patricia and Joey. Hopefully, it will be self-maintaining to some extent. I've already gotten updates from some of the add-in vendors.

There's really nothing like SharePoint Workshop on the web right now: It's a single place that IT managers can go to find components and consultants. It needs to be independent and open to all. I hope to get some head-to-head product reviews up there as well as some Try-It-Now areas similar to what http://www.w3schools.com/ does in the Web 1.0 space.

Moving away from new media, you're also a published author several times over, best known in the SharePoint ecosystem for O'Reilly's Essential SharePoint 2007: A Practical Guide for Users, Administrators and Developers.  That book recently saw an updated, second edition published.  Do you expect that additional updated editions may be forthcoming? 

You might assume I prefer print to new media, but really books are licensing artifacts. I love open source, free stuff, and all, but there's no great model for how to get paid. I plan to do a new print edition for the next product release, but I think it needs even more online content. O'Reilly (my publisher) is a leader in that space but they are not very Microsoft-oriented. I've been trying to change that and get SharePoint in the door there...well, I got past the door but right now I'm stuck under the stairs. Literally, in fact!

Tim O'Reilly coined the term "Web 2.0" and SharePoint lets people --not just programmers -- implement that vision. I've always thought (and said) SharePoint is an opportunity for O'Reilly. Tim, call my people, let's do lunch!

Earlier, you mentioned the SharePoint 2007 for Administrators course you wrote for AppDev, which was as a self-paced CD/DVD-ROM course.  Tell us a little about your experiences training SharePoint prior to writing that course, and how that previous experience played into your approach to writing the course.

Training is probably 80% of what I do now. Even when I'm implementing something in SharePoint, I'm usually training the person who will maintain and improve it when my contract ends. I feel really good about that and the opportunity with AppDev was to scale out that one-on-one time. Doing a live voice-over for four days and then a video shoot was the hardest thing I've ever done. The sound booth guys were ready to kill me after the first day. By Thursday, I had settled down enough for them to laugh at my jokes, and by the video shoot on the last day we were having fun. I hope that comes across.

A couple years ago, I got to teach SharePoint in Mexico City and Sao Paulo. The audience both places really got SharePoint and loved it more than I've seen in this country. SharePoint is one of the few software projects I've been involved in where users are actually delighted. It's a good space to be a trainer in!

In your pre-SharePoint professional life, you began the writing aspect of your career by authoring several books for the developer audience, with several titles on Excel Visual Basic.  Since you began your career as a member of the original Microsoft Visual Basic team, I'm compelled to ask what was it like working as a member of the Visual Basic team "back in the day"?

It was great! Visual Basic is the other software project I've seen that delighted folks. It's kind of similar to SharePoint really: make the easy stuff easy, without making the hard stuff impossible. That was our mantra back then and I see it in SharePoint now. When Microsoft hired me they had 3,000 employees and I sat two doors down from Bill Gates in building 4. It's obviously changed a lot since then, but I still get together with the original members of the Microsoft Flyfishers. We just got back from steelheading on the Deschutes: Jay and Matt landed fish; Tim and I got skunked. I feel lucky to know those guys.

You left Microsoft in 1994 to start your consulting business, Wombat Technology.  I'm curious about your landing the wombat as "your animal" on your books for O'Reilly, as I'd been under the impression that authors didn't have any say in the animal that would appear on the covers of their books.  Were you able to leverage the fact that your company featured an animal as the name to influence the decision of your "totem" animal at O'Reilly, or do I have the timeline wrong?

Uh, actually I threw a bit of a fit at the last minute when O'Reilly made my cover similar to another SharePoint book they were publishing that wasn't...how should I say...as good? They changed my cover to avoid confusion and that is how I won the wombat on the cover. This last edition, another publisher decided to re-use my title for their own book. That stinks and it hasn't worked in their favor, but that's publishing I guess.

With Wombat Technology, what do you find to be the most rewarding aspect of working as a consultant and trainer?  I'd have to guess that since the writing life is a largely solitary one, the interaction with others in the industry must almost be reward in itself?

My wife would laugh at that. Back in Seattle, I sat in the basement for Wombat Tech's first 9 months and she would send my daughter down to see if I could come out and play. I like being with others as much as being alone now. What's rewarding (besides pay) is seeing folks pick up concepts and extend them on their own. What I absolutely need for my work is the set of problems my customers are trying to solve. Those concrete needs teach me how to do my job better and let me help more people through books, blogs, or whatever. That was the missing piece while I was at Microsoft - we tried to solve abstract problems, and so we missed the mark sometimes. Collect enough concrete problems until you can sort through them and find the common archetypes - that's a formula for success. Bamboo Solutions seems to take that approach as well, I like that.

Thanks.  Taking a community-driven development process is key to our process, so seeking input from the folks who are using our products is essential.  We were thrilled to receive feedback from you recently with your excellent use case submissions --Agreements Repository (using the List Plus Web Part) and the Spamminator (using the Alerts Plus Web Part)-- to our forums last month.  I don't really have a question here, but I wanted to thank you for that participation in Bamboo Nation, and to also use it as an opportunity to tease the fact that we'll also be seeing a very interesting guest blog post from you very soon.

Again, thanks! I guess the big news is that I'll be guest-blogging directly in Bamboo Nation instead of through a feed, so I can put up free add-ins, samples, and other stuff. Check it out!

Speaking of Web Parts, in addition to offering samples of your books, you also used your Using SharePoint site to offer a few free Web Parts.  Is Web Part development an area that you see yourself devoting more time in the future?

Absolutely. In fact, I'd like to announce Essential SharePoint PowerTools (ESP). Click on the link to get the trial. The package includes the set of tools I use over and over again that I haven't found from any other vendor. I look forward to feedback on these products.

I'd like to wrap up with a set of questions that I like to ask all of the SharePoint experts we speak with, starting with, what would you say is your single favorite feature/functionality of SharePoint?

Templates. Users can create custom sites, lists, or libraries then save them as templates for reuse. That's essentially web programming with a drag-and-drop interface. Do you know how long we've tried to create a successful drag-and-drop programming tool? In my opinion, this is the first one that really works.

Conversely, what do you feel is SharePoint's biggest weakness/drawback?

Consistency. Joel Oleson said "SharePoint terminology is a mess." That's true, and so is the toolset: SharePoint Designer is probably the least consistent tool I've seen - it's not even compatible with MOSS publishing pages! The administration features are a lot better than they were in the previous version, but there's still a lot of "Where's Waldo?" going on.

What is your vision of collaborative computing five years from now?

In 5 years, I think most businesses will have implemented some form of collaborative computing as we understand it today with a browser interface and distributed administration. I think the editor or "Web librarian" role develops and you start to see folks with that title. There's already very little space left for client application development, except maybe for iPhones, so we programmers are all left targeting platforms rather than operating systems.

I also think email might be dead by then unless folks accept some general identity system. The anonymous nature of the public web results in huge abuses. We've got to solve that in a socially responsible way.

When you're not busy coding, writing about, or training SharePoint, how do you enjoy your downtime?  You mentioned flyfishing earlier ... any other hobbies or interests you'd care to share with our readers?

I like to bike, surf, and travel with my wife and kids when we get a chance. My son and daughter are both in college now, so it's cool seeing what they embrace. Dorian has discovered he's a pretty good "community organizer." And Sophia has too many talents to list. They're gonna be great!

Update:  Jeff dropped us a note following the publication of this piece to mention that he'd done a radio interview on Friday "related to the old days at Microsoft" that's now available via podcast.  For a deep dive into Jeff's time as a member of the original Visual Basic team, check out the Hanselminutes podcast here.