I started my career as a technical writer, developing engineering and marketing materials in the telecom and BI spaces, and trying to translate confusing technical jargon into straight-forward and reader-friendly content. I realized very early on that the best content wasn’t just filtered for humans, but was put into language and real-world scenarios that end users could apply to their daily business.
I submit that we need this same strategy for SharePoint content.
I was chatting with Mark Miller at the SharePoint Saturday DC event last weekend, and it got me thinking that the community-at-large needs to do more to fill this gap in online content. While I am a huge proponent of what Mark is doing with EndUserSharePoint.com (and highly recommend you submit all of your salient content to the site), it’s not about building out a single online portal, but about creating and disseminating content wherever you have influence. Think globally, build locally! Talk about real-world problems, and how you’ve been able to use SharePoint to solve them.
I am grateful for the wealth of speakers we have within the SharePoint community who take the time to share their deep insights into every nuance of the SharePoint platform. We need them to continue doing what they do. But we need more of the shared knowledge and experience of deployment experts – people who develop systems, then train and mentor end users - and have them talk about their experiences.
We need an end user content revolution! For EUSP, its happening. Mark is re-architecting the site to improve search, and has already reached out to the community to provide a broader set of solution-centric end user content. It’s time for people to step up and help. Who’s with me?
