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January 31, 2006

Training: Day 5 Of 6

Today concluded Day Five of a six-day internal training session on SharePoint.

One of my key projects right now consists of designing, developing and delivering a new-n'-improved version of the Planning Web site. The Office Product Planning core produces a steady stream of original research, analysis, and insight, and we (obviously) need to get that information to different groups inside Microsoft. Given that Microsoft employs 60,000 people - roughly the same number that live in the city of Bellingham, Washington - the project feels, in many ways, like a return to the commercial Web development work I did before b-school: making a small organization's information relevant to a large outside audience. It's actually a lot of fun.

SharePoint is a complex product (and a complex set of technologies), that fundamentally allows for groups of people - workgroups, teams, departments - to publish stuff created in Microsoft Office to the Web for later viewing and editing. So if you've got a PowerPoint deck, a handful of Word files, and some Excel spreadsheets that you need to post in a public place, well, SharePoint's a good tool. And naturally, it's the one we use internally.

(As an aside, SharePoint does lots of other stuff, too, which is mostly what these training sessions are about.)

Coming from a non-Microsoft Web development background (I'm all Apache/PHP/Java/Solaris/MySQL/Mac OS X), I've been on a pretty steep learning curve with terminology, architecture, concepts and inter-relationships between frameworks and whatnot. I've ridden this kind of curve before, back when I was evaluating (and deploying) a content-management server last year. But after five days straight of sitting on my butt in a training center, eyes on a computer screen, listening to lecture, drinking coffee and breathing my own CO2 emissions - well, my brain's like tapioca. Runny tapioca.

The good news, though, is that the product will do what I want it to do. SharePoint can handle 90% of my design, right out of the box. Which means I'll be spending a healthy chunk of my next few weeks actually building (and customizing) said design … but that's just fine with me. It's actually very cool to get a fresh take on something you know well - like translating a favorite novel into a foreign language.

It's back in to the breach tomorrow ... but tonight, I'm gonna unwind.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at January 31, 2006 7:44 PM. Posted to MSFT.

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