I don't yet have a fancy title at Infusion such as
Practice Manager of Emerging Technologies, but I've been working with SharePoint products and technologies for some time now and there are many tips, tricks and customizations that I want to share with the community.
Here are some of the things I've been busy with that I hope to write about at some point or another:
- Writing beta TS exams for WSS v3.0 and MOSS 2007 Application Development. I completed 70-541 earlier today and I have a few things to say about it (like what is with the questions where answers A and C would have the exact same code, only with different variable names??).
- Preparing a presentation on Rapid Web Application Development in WSS v3.0. Click here for the outline. I plan to deliver the presentation at an East of Toronto .NET User Group meeting to be held on March 15. If nothing else, at least take a look at the outline for a list of things you get for free (without coding or writing config files) when using WSS as a platform for your web apps.
- Working with Kurt to make SharePoint's plain vanilla blog support a lot more interesting and useful. For example, on our dev environment I've added trackback support that is nearly compliant with the full trackback spec. This means you will be able to write about an Infusion SharePoint-based blog post from your blog (on a supported blogging platform such as Live Spaces) and the Infusion blog post will automatically acknowledge your "trackback ping" and link back to your blog (and, of course, the Infusion blogger can subscribe to alerts to get notified when this happens). Other things I want to add are simple actions such as "kick it" and "bookmark it" (easy) as well as ratings for each blog post (a bit more tricky). (By the way, all of this customization involves fun stuff like computed fields specified in CAML list definitions, the SharePoint object model and little known features such as the "count related" capability of the lookup column).
In addition to describing technical "adventures" and findings like the above, I might also write about things like the business implications of using SharePoint and my experiences with how and why companies are embracing (or not embracing) SharePoint. (Is it just me, or do you also find that organizations sometimes absolutely love SharePoint even though they have no idea how to make the most of it?)