Joy in Repetition

The title of this blog post might give something away of my musical preferences (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDiRUM_7T1I ). Be that as it may, I enjoy the various Microsoft product life cycles. Especially the product life cycle for SharePoint, as this is my main area of expertise.

The upcoming SharePoint release is SharePoint 2013, and I believe it’s scheduled for release late 2012. I never thought Microsoft would actually call it SharePoint 2013 (as you can tell by looking at https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/11327.sharepoint-2012-best-practices-en-us.aspx , oops, how do I delete it?) since Microsoft seems to be superstitious about the number 13. When you visit the Microsoft campus in Redmond, you won’t find a building 13, though there is a building 12 and 14. Also, you will find there is no Office 13, although Office 12 and Office 14 do exist. Anyway, there is a new version of SharePoint coming and it has the number 13 in its name.

As for the SharePoint product life cycle, for me it goes something like this… First, there’s the buzz that a new version is in the make. Then, I start experimenting with the beta version (or, if I can get my hands on it, the alpha version). Once NDAs are lifted, the next interesting phase starts, as people start to write on the upcoming release leading to a sudden increase in available documentation. After that, I usually attend the MS SharePoint conference and start contributing to some books about the new version of SharePoint. Then, I start working with the new version as much as I can, reading about it, blogging about it, wiki’ing about, and forum’ing about it. I do that until the product life cycle ends and it starts all over again. As I said, there’s joy in repetition.

We’re still at the beginning of the SharePoint 2013 life cycle, but this also means we’re nearing the end of my most successful Wiki page to date, about SharePoint 2010 Best Practices: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/8666.sharepoint-2010-best-practices.aspx . Luckily, this also means the start of a new life cycle for a new Wiki page. I hope my new SharePoint 2013 Best Practices page will become even bigger and more popular than the last one. Right now, obviously, there is not much info on it yet, it will have to grow and best practices will have to develop while SharePoint 2013 is released and used. Without further ado, if you want, please check out: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12438.sharepoint-2013-best-practices.aspx .