Mr. Bob's Weblog

Okay, so at one point last year my boss two levels up got SharePoint so we can make a new Intranet, so we can replace our current ASP/VBScript Intranet that was made with Dreamweaver.

I’ve taken it upon myself to know more about what it is capable of and how we can make the best Intranet ever for my employer. This has involved attending a few SharePoint events,
reading some books & documentation, and so on and so forth.

So, I signed up for a conference in SharePoint, and have gotten a few calls from some slimy salespeople about how we met at conference. Except, I didn’t attend (Due to unforeseen circumstances). This post was prompted by call just now from another salesman who said “we met at the SharePoint conference.” I simply hung up on the liar.

This is how it’s been from the beginning. (Almost) every SharePoint “expert” or person I’ve run into, online or off, has been unhelpful and usually wants to sell me something. Not a lot for a developer who simply wants a broad spectrum of what SharePoint is even capable of. Very different from the Open Source software and Web community as I’m used to.

I like making money, and understand the idea of it, but in the communities I come from, it’s more of a “build first, pay later as you build more” mentality. Like buying shoes or a car. Try first, and see if it fits accordingly. Or even if not that, at least an overview of whatever I’m being sold, right? (Note: saying it can anything doesn’t count, especially if you don’t give me more technical details.)

It’s not all bad though. I attended a SharePoint seminar on forms from FEDSPUG. It used InfoPath, which appears to be some propriety front-end that I’ll never use. But other than that, the community there seemed lacking in snake-oil, which I like.

Hopefully, I’ll see more this in the future.

We will see!