From Mark Miller, Founder and Editor, EndUserSharePoint.com: This is the second in a series of articles celebrating the publication of 500 articles at EndUserSharePoint.com
The SharePoint playing field is long and broad. Pick an area and make it yours. Here at EndUserSharePoint.com, our focus is on the End User.
After a year of writing and editing SharePoint content, with over 500 articles and 5500+ Weekly Newsletter subscribers, it’s time for us to redefine exactly who our End User audience is, based upon who is reading the site, who is participating in the Stump the Panel Q&A Forum, and who our authors are.
Defining the Segments of the SharePoint End User Community
Based upon the highly analytical approach of me scanning comments, observing Stump the Panel and getting daily emails from our readers, I’ve broken the SharePoint End User Community into three, broad segments:
- Information Worker
- Power User
- Site Collection Administrator
Like I said, broad playing fields. Yes, Information Workers can be broken down into subgroups. So can Power Users, but in general these three categories can handle most of the content we produce here.
What are the types of content each segment of the End User community can expect from us? Who will be providing the content? I’ve been hashing this out for the past two weeks, trying to find the best way to provide the most useful content to the broadest spectrum of the SharePoint community.
So what’s the plan?
Here is the model I plan to use for the next year.
Take each End User segment, define what that segment is, determine the type of content relevent to that segment, estimate what total percentage of the reading community resides within that segment, and then allocate authors and topics.
What we are going to do here is take a subject and really drill down for you. As an example, you only have to look as far as Dessie Lunsford’s Taming the Elusive Calculated Column series, or Paul Grenier’s jQuery for Everyone series to see how this can work.
How it will work
I’ve asked each of our regular authors to choose a topic and create a series of articles on that topic. In addition to Paul and Dessie, we have commitments for the creation of:
- Data Web Forms and Databases - Greg Maass
- Common Business Scenarios - John Ross and Nicola Young
- Getting End User Buy In - Lee Reed
- Case Studies and SharePoint War Stories - Michael Hinckley
- Seamless Team Work, Weekly Workshop - Michael Sampson
- SPD Workflow - Paul Galvin, SharePoint MVP
- Mind Mapping for SharePoint - Ruven Gotz
- Fantastic 40 Templates - Toni Frankola
- CQWP and XSLT - Waldek Mastykarz, SharePoint MVP
- SharePoint Designer - Woody Windischman
What’s next?
That should get you pretty excited. I know I can’t sit still when I read that list. These people have real world experience they are willing to document and hand over to the SharePoint community and EndUserSharePoint.com is where they’ve chosen to put it.
I consider it an honor to publish these authors and I know they will appreciate your continuing support through your comments and feedback as they provide the best SharePoint End User content available anywhere.
In tomorrow’s segment, I will start defining the three levels of the SharePoint End User community. Stay tuned…