Lars Fastrup on SharePoint

About one year ago, my business partner Peter Steffensen and my self acquired the domain sharepointproducts.com, which is a name that perfectly match our plans for developing and launching new compelling add-on products for the Microsoft Office SharePoint platform. Now, our first shrink wrap product; CopyMove for SharePoint is finally ready for sale. I will introduce CopyMove and our motivation for developing it shortly in an upcoming post.

Last week, we launched our new company Web site, exposing the product to the market for the first time. The site is of course also powered by SharePoint - more specifically Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 running virtually on our own professionally hosted Dell PowerEdge server.

For now, the site is simply centered around this one product. But the next product is already in the works and we already have a third one as well on the road map. This reminds me to also do a post on the vision and strategy for our new company named SharePoint Products. I will do this after the next post where I just plan to talk about what our new product does and how.

General SharePoint Products

Here is a great new and very cool site for software developers. It lets developers ask and answer questions about any relevant software development topic. I really like the way Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky designed and implemented this site. The user interface is really slick and responsive and full of cool features. A really nice difference from the usual annoying developer forums is the ability to edit your questions and answers anytime. Gain a good reputation and you can even edit the questions of other people.

But most importantly, you very often get good answers from top specialist very fast and for free!! I am there helping out on topics like SharePoint, .Net and C# when I have time. However, the momentum on the SharePoint topic is yet to become significant. Hence this post to help spread the message to more SharePoint developers.

Go and check out www.stackoverflow.com

SharePoint, General SharePoint

I was filled with great sadness yesterday upon receiving the news of Patrick Tisseghem's tragic and sudden death in Gothenburg. My deepest sympathy and condolences foremost go to his wife, two young daughters and the rest of his family - what a tragic loss for them! I also have the deepest sympathy for his business partner at U2U, Wim Uyttersprot and all the employees there. It feels like a bad dream to me and I am still having a hard time believing this sad event to be true. It is very cruel and unfair of the big man up there to let him depart so early in his productive and successful life. We are many who had been looking forward to celebrating his 40's birthday in Belgium next month.

Patrick became a dear friend and inspirational peer to me. I feel privileged to have earned his friendship for five years since we met at his very first SharePoint 2003 course in Brussels. We have since done great things together like taking a trip to Grand Canyon in connection with a Las Vegas SharePoint conference where we also did the fun city together. Lately we also wrote a book on SharePoint Search - our favorite topic in SharePoint land. Back in June this year we did our first joint Workshop on SharePoint Search and I truly wish we could have had the chance to do this a lot more.

Patrick traveled the world like no other person I know and his work occasionally brought him by Aarhus where I live. Here we have spent many memorable evenings talking, laughing, barbecuing, working and drinking good single malt. I also promised to take him out sailing some time in Denmark and he invited me to come visit him and his family at their houses in Brussels and Cypress. I am so sad this will never be....

Farewell Patrick, I will always remember you and appreciate the few years we happened to know each other. You were a very joyful, witty and interesting person to spend time with and I will greatly miss you as a dear friend in life and great mentor in business. Your departure is a huge loss for all of us close to you as well as it is a huge loss to the whole SharePoint community.

General SharePoint

Hey and welcome to my new SharePoint blog. You might have come across my previous blog on SharePoint Search when I worked for Mondosoft. This blog is unfortunately no more as Mondosoft was acquired by another company last year and at which point I decided to seek new challenges as an independent contractor. Fortunately all my old posts are mirrored and preserved at sharepointsearch.com (thanks Chris). My new blog is hosted on the domain sharepointproducts.com as I acquired this with my business partner Peter Steffensen and we are simply working together on a new company named SharePoint Products.

But for now we mostly do consulting and I also really like my new job as an independent contractor for many reasons. One being that it has enabled me to make technical deep dives into more corners of the SharePoint platform as I used to in Mondosoft. There I was naturally dedicated to Enterprise search and this was also truly great and enabled me to gain enough knowledge and experience to co-author the book Inside the Index and Search Engines with Patrick. Enterprise search will for sure continue to be my favorite SharePoint topic but not the only one I want to work within.

The past six months have been a very busy time setting up my new consulting company, doing the actual consulting work, finishing the book early in the year, and more. All this meant I did not really get around continuing my blog on SharePoint. But now I finally managed to get it together and setup a new blog and this time one that runs on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with the Community Kit for SharePoint on top. I find it quite nice to have a real SharePoint blog when you are a SharePoint blogger.

Having worked intensively with SharePoint for my clients I have naturally also come across new interesting topics that are now on my blogging to-do list. They are for the most part technical issues related to software development on the SharePoint platform. I will of course also try to make short posts on new developments and trends in the business as I learn about them. I also have some conceptual posts on SharePoint waiting in the drawer.

Occasionally, I also get nice gigs completely outside the SharePoint world. Recently, I had one in Great Britain where an investor hired me to conduct technical due diligence on a software company that his company was looking to invest in. I have done this kind of work a few times by now and it is great fun and very rewarding work. You meet a lot of interesting people; some very talented and some utterly hopeless and then all those in between. It always amazes me how big the difference can between a really good software team that simply knows how to crank out great software and those who fail miserably in their attempt. I can for confidentially reasons not go into any details about my clients here. But the company in GB was fortunately one that really impressed me and I think my customer (the investor) is on a good track with these guys.

Now, I happen to really like Great Britain and the people over there and could therefore not resist taking a few days off and travel the country a bit before heading back to Denmark. The above picture is from Hotel Gleneagles in Torquay where John Cleese found the inspiration for one of my absolute favorite comedy shows Fawlty Towers. I booked a stay there for one night and did (un)fortunately not experience any staff rudeness as Cleese did in the early 70's.

General SharePoint