It’s been a long time: SharePoint for End Users
Yes, I haven't been slacking off taking the summer to relax which is why I haven't posted to my blog. Instead, we're heads-down working with customers, partners and our own field to sell and deploy MOSS 2007 and get ready for the next release. There were some exciting announcements recently around SharePoint as a business ($800M!!!), the BDC editor tool, and a bunch of other new technologies. As always, we can't achieve the success we've seen with SharePoint without the great support of our customers and partners.
I've been talking recently with a number of customers and I'm always amazed at the innovative solutions that they build on our technology. One customer runs a lot of their business processes on SharePoint using just customized lists. They are expanding the solution to include InfoPath Forms Services and mobile forms but the solution really opened my eyes to the end user empowerment that SharePoint delivers. The end users customize the columns, create the views and skin the site. Having come from the Exchange/Outlook world, that was always the vision for our collaboration platform – to make it simple for end users to customize their experience to make them more productive. Digression - One Outlook tip that a lot of people don't know about Outlook – natural language dating – try typing "third Tuesday of August" into an Outlook date field and you'll see what I mean.
Getting back to the topic at hand. Given that we want to make SharePoint ubiquitous and useful for everyone in an organization, you will see us come out with some new end user training for SharePoint over the next few weeks. Take a look when it comes out and provide your feedback. We believe that everyone in an organization can become more productive because of SharePoint, its integration with Office and its power to transform websites into collaboration sites.
Here's to the continuing success of SharePoint and having it help you and your business!
Tom
