Bye bye 2013 – My Year With SharePoint

Inspired by Wictor Wilén yearly blog series I try to summarize my year – last year I wanted to write one but I did not gather enough stuff to fill a page – lets try it again:

Wow, 2013 was an interesting year and the time has come for my annual blog post to sum up the year that soon has passed us and looking a bit into the crystal ball for the next one.

http://www.wictorwilen.se/summing-up-the-year-of-2013-and-embracing-2014

I truly was an interesting year – I totally enjoyed it. Professionally and personally.

Stackexchange / #SPHELP

I started actively to share my experiences and knowledge arround SharePoint and especially about SharePoint Search – I watched the tag #shelp on twitter and started to participate on sharepoint.stackexchange.com – I even got some badges and over 1.000 points:

Blog

Blogging is a lot of work for me – English is not my first language, but I reached a stage where I can now enjoy writing and sharing my thoughts – even when I know its not perfect – maybe in 2014 I find some time to improve my writing skills, otherwise please apologize my errors. What I actually wanted to say: I invested a lot of time in this blog, answered each and every comment (roughly 100), wrote 44 blog posts and received roughly 50.000 views this year – wow, this is fun! Compared to last year this is 10x more – thanks for reading and following my stuff, motivates me a lot! Here is a list of my most viewed posts in 2013:

1. Install Office Web Apps 2013 for SharePoint 2013 – with PDF Preview
2. SharePoint 2013 – Create a Search Service Application and Search Topology with Powershell
3. Cache cluster is down, restart the cache cluster and Retry
4. SharePoint 2013 Design Manager: Map network drive on Windows Server 2012
5. SignalR in SharePoint 2013 – the real-time web is coming!

1, 2, and 5 are my personal favorites – it was great discovering how to build these solutions – I even used them for several client projects. But the most fun I had was writing this one: SharePoint 2013 Search Preview for Documents hosted in SharePoint 2010. The help and feedback I received from the SharePoint Community for this one was amazing! I even got contacted by Microsoft why and how I built it…

SharePoint certifications

I am one of the guys who thinks that certifications really help – so I try to do plenty of them (it’s a good motivation for my team, too). This year I only did 3 certifications (070-417, 071-488, 071-489), next year resolution (one of them) is to finish all SharePoint 2013 certs.

Contributions

I contributed to several Open Source SharePoint Solutions – and I even started my own ones:

1. SPSignalR – a solution to create real-time updates in SharePoint WebParts (see it here in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QgzJ0HkDs8)
2. SharePoint Chocolatey: I created several packages to install SharePoint tools with PowerShell

Giving back solutions & knowledge and receiving questions about solutions I share is really worth some nights and weekends –. sounds crazy, but try for yourself! I would not be where I am right now without the professional solutions and shared knowledge floating around in the SharePoint Community.

Toolbox

I spent countlessly hours creating webcasts – rerecording them – deleting them – in both English and German (the German SharePoint community needs some love, too). I want to do more of them, even do a recording of paid tools (Avepoint, SPCAF, SPDockit, … ) – it takes time, it’s a good practice for me – and its FUN! More to come in 2014.

Conferences / Speaking

Conferences are great – meeting twitter friends personally is great, I even had the honor to chat with THE one Todd Klindt at TechEd in Madrid (that is always super fun!!!) – good stuff. I want more of it – hopefully I can convince my boss to send me to SPC14… the new year will tell! Additionally I went to two or three SharePoint User Groups in Munich – next year I will speak at least at one in February/March. Two “conference” highlights in 2013 were the two ShareCamps. One in Munich and the second (and first one ever) in Vienna, Austria. In Munich I gave two presentations, one about Search and the other one about SharePoint Tools – see the recap here. I even try to speak at some international conferences – the biggest one will be the free SP24 conference – I could need some votes here: http://list.ly/i/419694

SharePoint

It was a great SharePoint year – I had very exciting new projects, a migration and two SharePoint from scratch projects – one very challenging. SharePoint 2013 gains more and more traction in Germany – 2014 there will be more of it. Hopefully I get rid of all SharePoint 2007 projects – this old stuff… not good for me, not good for my clients (I am not saying its always the tool!).

Twitter

The one and only “tool” is twitter – I received so much help and feedback, meet new and old friends (I am looking at you: @meligo @mysharepoint @zimmergren @ToddKlindt @stacyDraper @HughAJWood @jimmywim @MLCarter1976 @hupseb @michl86 – in no particular order!)

Are you on twitter? Why not follow me? 🙂

Predictions

As Wictor did it – I try my own 3 predictions:

• 2014 will be the year of search

I have more booked search training for 2014 than I had in 2013 this time – and with the enhanced SharePoint 2013 search there will be many challenges! And I hope that SP1 for SharePoint 2013 brings more of it – maybe a push api for Search Indexing?

• Hosting on Azure for Dev/Test will accelerate – even in Germany.

Hosting on azure is pricey – but its worth it. You only pay what you use, perfectly for dev/test in the cloud.

• Apps Apps Apps

I did not see that many SharePoint Apps – but I will write my own and hopefully my clients will jump on the apps train!

Happy New Year!

Phew – more than I thought, what a year! But now its time to say thanks for reading so far – next year will be exciting, too!

I wish you all a Happy New Year – may it be even better than the last and with lots of fun! See you around!