What is Office 365 SharePoint Online like when you use it for real? My company has been using Office 365 in anger for a month or so now, here is a review of the SharePoint component from a general business user perspective with a bias to using it for learning. Most of the good points come from standard SharePoint: Make site and pages easily. For example, I run our annual data security competency tests in my company, and use a SharePoint list to track when people are due for a test (see here for more on this). All the rest of SharePoint is there too. The Good. MORE >>

Thought leader interview with Jim Federico of Microsoft on how Microsoft use SharePoint internally for learning. How does Microsoft use SharePoint for learning? believe we’re the world’s largest SharePoint implementation. From a training perspective, we use SharePoint in a few interesting ways. We’re just wrapping up a project to build a SharePoint search experience for training. This is a really simple thing to do and I encourage all customers running SharePoint to consider doing the same. The list gets indexed by SharePoint once or twice a day. MORE >>

I recently had the opportunity to attend and speak at SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, California along with roughly 8,000 other attendees. This was the first SharePoint conference since the Fall of 2009. It was also the first conference since the launch of SharePoint 2010 – the latest public version available to customers. Although I appreciate the launch of the Microsoft Certified Architect program for SharePoint, this really shouldn’t be your ‘big’ announcement at your pinnacle conference. SharePoint 15? Sad really. Egads. MORE >>

m off to SharePoint Saturday UK, set in the historic town of Nottingham (famous for persecuting Robin Hood, the outlaw noble who stole from the rich to give to the poor). SharePoint Saturdays are community events, free to attend, paid for by low-key sponsors. What is a SharePoint Saturday like? Well there were 300 attendees, mostly SharePoint users and administrators, but with a few SharePoint grandees like Mark Miller and Todd Klindt. How does a SharePoint Saturday compare to a formal conference? SharePoint Application Showcase from the Salvation Army. MORE >>

Thought leader interview with Ray Fleming of Microsoft Australia about SharePoint’s place and future in Education. Where do you see SharePoint being used in Education? It’s very widely used in schools, colleges and universities right around the world, because it brings many web services together into one place – and because learning is all about making connections and collaboration, SharePoint has been widely adopted to help that. In the UK, over 80% of universities are using SharePoint. SharePoint can look amazingly different depending on who gets their hands on it. MORE >>