SharePoint is My Blog Platform

My friend Jeff recently wrote about something about SharePoint that needs to change on Google and Bing. Autocomplete shows a negative picture of SharePoint when you type SharePoint followed by the word is and then a space. I hope this post will start a trend of positive posts about what “SharePoint is” for many others like us. Let’s change autocomplete!

SharePoint is a tool Jeff evangelizes and one that has been my area of technical specialty for since late 2006 and longer if you count my work on the Microsoft Content Management Server in 2005. SharePoint is a lot of things to me, including the source of all of my development and consulting work for the last 4 years. SharePoint is a topic I speak about publicly. SharePoint is a common part of the User Group Community I help lead. SharePoint is the basis for the wonderful SharePoint Saturday movement. But possibly the most publicly visible aspect of it for me is that SharePoint is my blog platform.

	My first SharePoint Blog, started in September 2007, was hosted on WordPress which is a wonderful blogging platform. Before that, I had dabbled in blogger both on blogspot and self-hosted and found WordPress a little easier to customize, though a little harder to get started up in.
	My second SharePoint Blog, started in May 2008, was hosted on the Community Kit for SharePoint Enhanced Blog Edition, or CKS:EBE, on SharePoint 2007. I was lucky to have a group of talented admins and developers set up the blogging platform for me and it worked very easily for me. At first, I authored the posts in the browser in SharePoint’s Rich Text Editor. That’s fine for short posts without many images, but I grew to really like Windows Live Writer for how easy it made image uploading. Using Live Writer to author blog posts is very natural coming from a Microsoft Word background.
	My current blog is hosted on SharePoint Foundation 2010. The great thing about SharePoint 2010 is that I don’t even need CKS:EBE. I get commenting, categories and a good RSS feed out of the box. I kind of miss the pretty named web page addresses of my last two blog hosts, but the tradeoff of blogging about the platform on the platform was a pretty easy one to make. Down the line, I plan to create a custom master page for this blog which will bring it inline with the more custom visual styles of the previous two blogs.

I can’t recommend SharePoint for all bloggers, but for myself and many others who specialize in SharePoint, SharePoint is a great platform for blogging.

How about you? What can you say about SharePoint on your blogs or tweets that might change the Google and Bing autocomplete issue Jeff posts about. How do you finish the phrase “SharePoint is?”