I have a dirty secret
With the lack of ICS / Lotus community podcasts I have begun to listen to SharePoint community podcasts – there I said it, its off my chest now – they say daylight is the best disinfectant.
And I actually really like them. This one is a crowd of MS MVPs ( a bit like IBM Champions ) reflecting on the state of SharePoint in a studio set aside for them by Microsoft at their equivalent of Connect.
The podcast is vibrant, positive but also realistic – people get to express concerns and worries but the overall impression is of a platform moving forward and creating great business value. While the podcasts are not formally endorsed by MS the relationship between MS and the MVPs seems to be a trusting one with MS providing a studio etc.
I think that the ICS community also has an equally positive story to tell and I think that they might be more effective at telling it to certain audiences than IBM.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was something similar from Connect 2013 ? Does anyone already have stuff planned ? I would be up for trying to facilitate something if others are interested.
As to the state of SharePoint it seems to be an interesting time. As a business owner and trusted advisor to customers I would be negligent not to be knowledgeable about other options.
SharePoint is definitely maturing and is becoming both more Social and more App Centric. At the same time the Roadmap appears much less clear than the current IBM roadmap with respect to applications – this comes through very clearly from this and other podcasts.
As an ISV / Development shop owner I would find this very worrying. With the IBM stack the ability to run applications from versions 4,5,6,7 and 8 on the most recent server without compatibility issues has been a God send for us and our customers. I really can’t imagine how we would manage to maintain the hundreds of bespoke applications we have written if changes were needed at every server upgrade.