Personal Thoughts on Work, WSS 3.0 Announcements

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“It is customer interaction that drives innovation.”

One of the things I love the most about my job, aside from working with many brilliant people in a fast-paced and exciting company, is getting to work directly with customers. I’ve spent the bulk of my career largely inside of IT organizations, but always with some role in the customer relationship, and so it was important that I continue that connection when I came to Microsoft earlier this year.

What is exciting to see is the translation of customer questions into product solutions. Every customer query needs to have a prescriptive answer, because customers want to know specifically how your technology is going to solve their immediate needs. What is your solution for enterprise content management? What does it take to extend the basic project management and business intelligence capabilities of your tools? How does your platform solve my business needs? All great questions that help us to better define and prioritize our solutions. No matter how brilliant the collective unconscious, I believe that it is customer interaction that drives innovation.

Which is one reason I’m so passionate about SharePoint as a platform — these teams are working so hard to ensure their platform is solving real world business problems. So I’m sitting here in my office at the end of another long day, having made some progress on a couple of deliverables and consumed about as much content as my brain can handle. I’m reading through my oft neglected email and notice all the fanfare around the announced availability of Windows SharePoint Server (WSS) 3.0. While my organization’s services are based on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) platform, not WSS, I am still very much connected to the WSS team, and am very excited about this important release.

If you’re interested in WSS, here are some important links:

For those familiar with SharePoint, the differences between v2 and v3 will jump out immediately: Workflow. Trash can. Item level permissions. More templates and tools, including wikis and weblogs. The SharePoint team has heard your requirements, and have built a compelling offering. You need to check it out.

Ok, my cheerleading is done.

Christian Buckley

Christian is a Microsoft Regional Director and M365 Apps & Services MVP, and an award-winning product marketer and technology evangelist, based in Silicon Slopes (Lehi), Utah. He is a startup advisor and investor, and an independent consultant providing fractional marketing and channel development services for Microsoft partners. He hosts the weekly #CollabTalk Podcast, weekly #ProjectFailureFiles series, monthly Guardians of M365 Governance (#GoM365gov) series, and the Microsoft 365 Ask-Me-Anything (#M365AMA) series.