It’s Not All About the Web Parts

Written on February 7, 2008 by Bryan

That’s one of our sayings at work. “It’s not all about the web parts.” Before I got involved with SharePoint, I was kind of scared of it. I only knew about what little I had seen of it, and like many people seem to at first glance, I thought it was just another enterprise portal product. I figured that instead of widgets or gadgets or portlets or iViews it was just webparts. I think lots of people at our company still see it that way. They will learn, as I have, that it is not all about the web parts. It’s so much more.

In my brief experience with SharePoint so far I have learned quite a bit. I have focused mostly on development, writing a workflow here, a custom field type there, a couple of event handlers here and there. I have barely scratched the surface of attainable SharePoint knowledge. More than any other technology I have ever seen or worked with, finding information about SharePoint on the web is incredibly easy thanks to the emergence of the blog as a knowledge sharing resource. The various blogs listed to the right (among countless random others) have proven invaluable in my quest to know more about SharePoint. While I realize I am hardly a Microsoft MVP or even close to a SharePoint expert like many of those listed, I’m hoping there is room for yet another SharePoint related blog. I’m sure there will be at least a few things I will be able to share with the general WSS and MOSS community as I stumble through learning about this incredibly powerful and intimidating technology.

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