First, a confession: Contrary to my usual custom when approaching a new installment of SharePoint Blank, I had made a fair number of notes last week, sorting through my thoughts and sketching out the parameters that I wanted to cover in this "What is SharePoint?" series. I only scratched the surface of those thoughts in my initial column though, as it's my intention here to not only think out loud on the topic, but to also learn in the process. Longtime readers are well aware that the learning-something part of that equation is a key component of this blog. Along those lines, let me be perfectly honest here: There are innumerable people, most of whom have been working with SharePoint for a heck of a lot longer than the just-over-a-year I've got under my belt, who can probably provide an authoritative answer to the question of What is SharePoint. Me? I'm here to learn, to sift through what I've learned, and to share what I've learned, as honestly and openly as I'm able.
One of the things I realized last week as I began to think about both the question of "What is SharePoint?," and how I might approach tackling that question in SharePoint Blank, was this: There really is no single right answer, but instead there are countless right answers. And I would submit that just one of the reasons that there are countless right answers is that what SharePoint is varies depending on what you use it for. As such, it could be argued that definitions of SharePoint are not only varied, but role-based.
What do I mean by that? Well, I think that SharePoint is many things to many people. What SharePoint is to end users is different from what SharePoint is to developers, or to systems administrators, or even to CIOs and CEOs. Obviously, there is a commonality in that at its most reductive, SharePoint is, well, a Microsoft platform, but I wonder if what SharePoint is may be less important than what it can do ... and, more importantly, what you can do with it. (Recognizing, of course, that depending on your discipline and the manner by which you approach and employ -or deploy, as the case may be- it, what you can do with SharePoint may vary greatly.)
To paraphrase Walt Whitman, SharePoint is large, it contains multitudes.
One of the earliest definitions of SharePoint that I encountered was from Dux Raymond Sy, when I attended Learning Tree's Empowering Your Organization with SharePoint course that he presented last summer. Explaining that, like Office, "SharePoint is an umbrella term for a suite of products," Dux said that at its core, SharePoint "allows individuals in an organization to easily create and manage their own collaborative Web sites."
I should also note that Dux was the first person I encountered who flat-out acknowledged that there are a multitude of SharePoint definitions available out there. Speaking of Dux, pictured at left is his ride, which he affectionately refers to as the SharePoint Geek Vagen.
Needless to say, and as you can see, Dux is a man who is truly committed to answering the question of "What is SharePoint?"
I'd like to close this week by mentioning that I've gotten a small amount of feedback on my initial entry in this series, and I'm very grateful for that input. I'd like to invite everyone reading to share your own thoughts as to what SharePoint is - either in general, or what SharePoint is to you specifically. I'd like nothing more than for this to become an interactive series, so please don't be shy ... leave a comment below or, if you prefer, send me an email at john.anderson@bamboosolutions.com.
Catch up on the entire "What is SharePoint?" series:
Posted
Jul 17 2009, 04:40 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.