I love the SharePoint community. I’ve never seen such a caring group of experts sharing their knowledge through blogs, Twitter or other channels. Until a few months ago I never doubted about the true intentions of the community members. We all shared our information. Period. No strings attached, but is this still the same? In the past few months the SharePoint community grew almost exponentially. There are a lot of new members who are sharing and caring but are they are true? Many of them are consultants; they are selling SharePoint solutions for living. That scares me because sometimes I’m not sure if they are really telling the truth, the right solutions for your problem. Do they have a hidden agenda, like selling their products or services? How can I be sure of this?
Let me repeat my first line: I love the SharePoint community! I’m just a little concerned about the quality and how the preserve this.
How can I be sure that the information is true? Do we have to rely on the feedback and comments at the end of the articles or do we have to trust on the bio of the authors?
What do you, community members, think?
Gene,
I think I understand what you try to tell.
It is so, that some tweeps or people who blog are employed or contracted by companies that have solutions for specific SharePoint problems. Or maybe they just really like that product and would like to share that with the community.
I think it is normal that they then promote their ’employers’ products and I don’t see anything wrong with that.
Twitter and blogs are just a means of communication. It is up to us, the information consumers to filter the “ads” from the real content. You have to apply the same methodology when reading the newspaper or a magazine.
I know who in my network sometimes tweets or writes blog posts with a commercial smell, which I don’t consider a bad thing. There are (great) products out there, where a good SharePoint consultant should be aware of.
Just make sure you get the product, test and try it, and just don’t read the sales pitch…
And off course, there is some homework (due diligence) to do, and you can’t take everything that has been written for granted?
Try reading some stock market blog posts, forums, or tweets to find real hidden agenda’s…
Patrick
@Patman2520
Guys,
this makes me think of an Umbraco (open source .NET CMS) event I visited where, if I mentioned that I am working with SharePoint, people frowned. Was I maybe an impostor? At least I was seen as somewhat of a capitalist 🙂
Generally speaking it is very hard to generalize. That said I believe that everybody has a motivation (commercial, ego, loyalty, …). The commercial motivation is often the easiest to spot in my opinion. Therefor maybe not the worst of (hidden) motivations?
I think that with a growing community the edges can be less well defined and the roles that people play also. Currently I see more ‘noise’ coming from ‘aspiring SharePoint experts’ than from the ‘Infomercial types’.
But who am I to say? Am I part of this community or not … and is this comment not motivated by trying to establish myself as being ‘in’ — two options I guess : if it is noise then try to cancel it out, if not ask the sender of information as to his/her real intentions.. I guess you will find the same set of motives that drives most people to do things..