TriNUG SharePoint group meeting

May 6, 2009

Just got done with attending the TriNUG SharePoint group meeting. Mike Gannotti presented on how to adopt SharePoint in an organization. Lots of good stuff, and this was far more about social media tools adoption in orgs rather than much that was specific to SharePoint. The biggest kerfuffle tonight was Mike’s bombshell statement that “if users have to search, you’ve failed”. Lots of good back and forth on this, although I don’t have much time to document the whole thing.

I did ask whether SharePoint search would take in to account *where* a search is initiated from. For example, if I start a search in a particular wiki, the search should rank those wiki posts higher. The quick answers I got were that either SharePoint does that out of the box, or it can be tuned to do that. Seems like it would make more sense that have that default behaviour if it’s not.

Someone else across the room brought up that something that needs to be done is someone should be watching the search queries to see how people use the system, then tune for that future users. This is likely something that would need to be revisited later.

Mike also talked about using scoring to help encourage participation. Giving points to people who create content, and other points to people who engage with the content (ratings, replies, downloads), then allowing people to redeem the points for stuff (he’s getting a netbook based on this point system) is a way to get people using the system and putting in content which will be held for the long term inside the company in question. Neat idea. Knowing that companies are actually *doing* it is even better.