My colleague, Dux, has been bugging me for a while now to start blogging.  I keep explaining to him that while Chief Evangelists have all the time in the world to surf the web and to blog, peons like me who actually have to implement and deliver a project do not even have time to read DIGG or monitor Slickdeals.net anymore, much less blog.

Obviously, Dux has finally convinced me since here I am writing my first blog.  What has finally convinced me?  It's certainly not because I suddenly find myself with time to spare.  Far from it.  We have 2 major SharePoint projects due to finish 2 to 3 weeks from now (it really is 4 weeks from now but I have to say 2 to 3 weeks in case our architect is reading this), and my work every day usually isn't done until midnight, only to go to bed and dream about SharePoint some more.

What has finally convinced me is simply the thrill of learning, and wanting to share what I've learned.  Another reason is that other people's blog has been tremendously helpful when I've been stuck on something or need to research a particular SharePoint functionality.  I feel that I have to start putting some time aside to give back to the community.

I am a process engineer and business analyst by training so I would focus more on the business side of SharePoint: How we've used SharePoint to address business pain points, improve ingrained business processes, and introduce totally new business processes.  Since I still am a techie by heart, I would also probably delve into power user functionalities of SharePoint - functionalities that I would normally ask a developer to implement but I have found some way to achieve using out of the box SharePoint capabilities.  I normally discover these gems because our technology team is always so slammed that I am forced to figure out how to provide the solution without using our architects and developers.

So enough of the introduction.  In my next post, I would share my recent experience in trying to help a client implement a "Fillable Form" solution using InfoPath.