Welcome… I’m Thomas Duff, aka “Duffbert”. I’ve been writing as part of my technical career for years, with the hub of much of what I do over on my original blog at Duffbert’s Random Musings. Little did I know when I started blogging nearly 10 years ago, it would take me places I never imagined.
SharePoint Duffbert is a new blog effort I’m starting as I get more focused on the next phase of my technical career. For the last 15 or so years, I’ve been working with collaborative software as a developer using IBM Lotus Notes and Domino. Contrary to what many others may think, Notes (as I’ll refer to it for brevity’s sake), is an extremely powerful application development platform. I started Duffbert’s Random Musings as a way to share Notes knowledge in that community. I also inserted a lot who I am, my struggles, my opinions, and as time went on, more book reviews than you would probably believe. But basically, that blog is more personal and more Notes-related, and that’s not really where I’m at right now.
SharePoint Duffbert will be my platform to share tips and tricks as I stumble along the SharePoint path with many others on the same journey. I’m sure there will be editorial pieces, perhaps even some videos… And if things go the way I expect them to, there will be presentations made at SharePoint gatherings such as SharePoint Saturdays, User Group Meetings, and… ? I’ve co-authored two books in the IBM world on Sametime, so it’s not like I would rule that out completely either.
Anyway, I want SharePoint Duffbert to retain who I am as a person in the tech industry, while also focusing the topics at hand to be SharePoint-related. There will be far more development information than administration material. In the Lotus/Domino world, I was a developer who had just enough admin skills to be dangerous to myself and others. For SharePoint, my learning curve for just development will be so steep that I don’t even want to pretend that I know what will happen when I click something in Central Admin. That’s what I have coworkers for at this point in my career… 🙂
So again, I welcome you here. While I’m documenting things I’ve learned on a daily basis, I hope that you’ll come along and pick up a thing or two. We’ll work out the details as we go, and hopefully have some laughs and a beer or two along the way… or a Midori Sour… those are *really* good…
SharePoint Duffbert 
A belated welcome the the SharePoint world. My hands on experience was with SharePoint 2007, getting really creative with lists, libraries and the like, including governance (ugh). No Central Admin for me though; I knew better. I’m a SharePoint 2010 user with little time to fool around with it much. I do have admin type privileges on a few sites though; scary thought.
I like what you’ve done with the place… Congratulations from one of your ‘other’ friends (not SP)… Cheers!
Congratulations on another blog, Tom. I’m sure this one will be as good as your Random Musings.
Good on ya Tom! Glad to see you’ve gotten this started and I’ll be happy to be adding the RSS feed for this blog to my ‘SharePoint’ folder in my Google Reader account. Hopefully at some point I’ll get back on the bandwagon in this area as well, but don’t hold your breath! 😉
Thanks, everyone… This is one thing off my “to be done” list, and I hope it helps others (as well as myself) going forward.
Very nicely done Tom. I will definitely be following along and stumbling through my blog once I get it set up. Lots of modiri sours for us in Vegas after our minds explode from all the learning. 🙂