One thing I *really* like about blogging is the debates that go on in the blogosphere.  I love a good debate, as long as it doesn’t get personal.  I mean come on.  Your blog is your own, say what you want… we all live in the land of freedom of speech of the provided by the Internet.  Does SharePoint Suck or does it rock??  Should we be comparing the product written 5 years ago to the latest open source or google sites?  I don’t think it’s fair, but the comparisons will continue.  I do hope to have some of these open debates after SPC, when my tongue gets loosed.

Bil Simser “SharePoint FUD is spreading far wide and fast” and his arch nemesis Bjorn Furuknap “SharePoint sucks and here’s why (part 1 in a continued series)” are at it again with some great mud slinging, but not at each other.  It’s a debate about SharePoint.  Rackley helps push forward the debate with “SharePoint Haters just don’t understand.”  Paul Culmsee defends Infopath from Bil as the greatest product in his post “Why Infopath Rocks” I think this actually might have begun after the post from the SharePoint Developer that uses Drupal.  I think there’s some decent content, but most of it doesn’t apply when you look at the new stuff.  So it’s just poor timing.  It’s also written as Drupal rocks, what sucks about SharePoint.

The real challenge I see is the 3 year release cycle for SharePoint.  It’s much more regular from the release cycle of SQL or Windows, you can almost set your yearly watch to it.  Some of these scrappy open source products have figured a few things out.  They’ve got something in wikis, blogs, and other social networking features.  3 years is more than a decade in our current rate of growth.  So yeah, it feels like you’re running ancient technology to deploy a SharePoint wiki, really the first productized over the counter wiki on the market.  I hope to see MS address this beyond what happens in the community with CKS (Community Kits).  The tools teams can do a better job of putting out decent updates and I expect the threats to be decent enough that we’ll see some serious moves especially in Online services.

The DANCE.  The SharePoint dance is understanding what can be changed in a SharePoint environment without making it tough to support, or making it difficult to upgrade or worse.  It’s not like a new .NET project.  There’s already something there, and you need to learn how it behaves and moves.  As developers get experience and as the tools get better this dance is a lot smoother and lady SharePoint won’t do those hard core gyrations so much.  When you learn this dance, and by the way it’s not a 2 step or a waltz, you’ll come to find the rhythm of the product and overcome the hater mentality and actually come to fully embrace the product and the richest community in existence.  There’s no community around a product tighter and closer than the SharePoint community.  We are all in this dance together, so crank up the music and enjoy what we’ve got and yes this new dance partner rocks, let me be the first to tell you.