What a long week! I spent this whole week taking some SharePoint training classes and my brain is tired. It was kind of nice to be a way from work but I know I have a lot of work to get caught back up on next week. Especially since I’ll be on vacation the week after.
Anyway, back to SharePoint…my company is interested in implementing at least some of SharePoint internally so after playing with it for a while, I decided I probably should take some classes before going any further with it. It’s flexible (almost too flexible) and can be very confusing.
After a week of classes, I have a better understanding of it but I still find pieces of it confusing. There are just a lot screens that look similar and often have similar functionality but you can only get to them in very specific ways. It can be difficult to find the specific screen you need to find. Even the instructor got lost in the interface a few times, so I don’t feel too bad when that happens now.
Overall, I see some great potential in SharePoint but I also see the potential for a lot of work maintaining it. Luckily for now, we’re only going to be using WSS 3.0 and not the full SharePoint 2007 software and we’re only going to roll it out to one department at a time. More than likely, we’ll eventually start using the full version but for now, the basic version will make a big difference…better document management, document versioning, better and easier to use interface than our current Intranet, etc.
I’m excited!
A while back, I saw a post on Digg about the finalists being picked for a contest Microsoft was having where developers built projects using on of the Visual Studio Express products and/or SQL Express called Made In Express. The contest site is a pretty nice looking site, but what surprised me was that it was created using ASP, meaning it was not actually “Made In Express” like the finalists projects were.
Eating Your Own Dog Food
Obviously, the purpose of this contest is to show developers some of the cool things you can create using the free Visual Studio Express software, so I’m amazed that Microsoft missed a great opportunity to show that it eats its own dog food. I guess to be fair, ASP is a Microsoft product, but it is more like they are eating their own old and stale dog food. After all, the Express software is all about .NET and should have been created in Visual Web Developer.
I know that Robert Scoble has written a few times about Microsoft “eating the dogfood” (see this post from last week) so I’m sure he would disapprove as well. They do have an RSS feed on the site though, which is almost redeeming, but not quite.
Made In Something Other Than Express
I’ll never use an Express product now because of this hypocrisy! Ok, just kidding. I do actually use Visual Web Developer every day at work and even most nights and weekends when I’m not at work and I love it. I was just a little disappointed the site wasn’t “Made In Express” like it should have been.
It really is a good product (I can only speak for VWD) and this is coming from someone that refused to use Visual Studio in the past for web development. Dreamweaver in edit view was always my editor of choice. Unfortunately, I do still have to use it for FTP because the FTP tool in VWD is terrible! That’s probably my only real complaint about VWD. Intellisense makes up for any of its weaknesses though. That alone makes my life so much easier.
Next Time, Make It In Express!
Anyway, I hope the next time Microsoft does some sort of contest or whatever promoting their Express products that they actually use them to make their site.
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