I'm just back from vacation, and I must say that it was a pleasure to return and read Jeffrey Washington's comments on each of the preceding posts in this ongoing "What is SharePoint?" mini-series. Thanks for your feedback, Jeffrey!
As well, I must confess that since I was essentially under orders to relax, stay offline, and truly enjoy my vacation, I didn't spend much time thinking about SharePoint while I was away, either in a general sense, a specific sense, or even a "What is SharePoint?" sense. But vacation is over, and the time has come to jump back into the blogging pool (which I actually already did earlier today with a short post on the Bamboo Team Blog about additional chances to win a full access pass to the Best Practices Conference), so I'm going to dedicate this installment of "What is SharePoint?" to an aspect of SharePoint whose importance I honestly don't think it's possible to overstate, and that is the worldwide community of users which rallies around SharePoint. You see, SharePoint is a platform that engenders a truly admirable level of passion in its adherents, which, in turn, has fostered the creation and continued existence of an equally admirable ecosystem: the SharePoint community.
Though it may come as a surprise to some, the ecosystem which has sprung up around SharePoint is a truly mighty network, largely made up of users (of varying skill-sets and disciplines) helping other users ... and it's a network which extends far beyond online resources such as blogs, message boards, and webcasts. Needless to say, the importance and usefulness of such online resources is immense in and of itself, especially given that many of the best and brightest SharePoint professionals freely participate and communicate with users through such avenues. Also of note is that, at a guess, I'd say that the vast majority of these efforts are unpaid.
In addition to the online community efforts, the SharePoint community also includes many "real world" aspects, such as self-organized independent worldwide user groups consisting of dedicated SharePoint users; conferences held around the world, such as the aforementioned Best Practices Conference and the official Microsoft-hosted SharePoint Conference, to name just two of many such conferences; free events such as SharePoint Saturday, which often feature many of the same marquee names as appear at the larger conferences, but at which they're appearing without pay, and for the good of the community; and then there are SharePints, which are informal gatherings (usually at a local bar, hence the name) of SharePoint professionals and enthusiasts. The common thread throughout, both online and offline, is SharePoint users helping other SharePoint users.
This level of dedication and user participation is, to me, not only impressive on the merits, but may very well qualify as a phenomenon. And I would submit that it's unquestionably a crucial part of understanding what SharePoint is. Which is to say that, in addition to all the other things that SharePoint is (some of which I've already talked about, and much many more of which remain to be explored), SharePoint is a platform which manages to extend what may be its primary raison d'etre of enabling and enhancing online collaboration into a means for users to come together and, in essence, collaborate with each other, both online and in person, to improve the SharePoint experience for everyone.
And that, my friends, is truly something to celebrate.
Catch up on the entire "What is SharePoint?" series:
Posted
Aug 07 2009, 05:43 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.