A brief detour back to SharePoint
Banner created with Microsoft Designer

A brief detour back to SharePoint

At #Button2022, the content design conference, I was asked, "Are you a content designer? I thought you were a SharePoint expert."

"Are you a content designer? I thought you were a SharePoint expert."        

More and more these days, I can't claim to be the latter. Because, for the past 6 years, I've been focused on growing in the former.

However, every once in a while, I can't help dipping my toes back into the SharePoint waters, because it's such a comfortable pool for me to be in. I've never liked to be defined by generalizations anyway!

Updating a post from 13 years ago

To that end, I've updated one of the most viewed of the two hundred blog posts I wrote on SharePoint before moving on to content design. In a one-year period starting September 2014, an average of 1000 people a month spent more than 5 minutes on the page looking for the answer to a SharePoint mystery, What is limited access? And how do I remove it?

A view of the unique pageviews over time for the article on limited access, from Google Analytics. It shows a fairly flat curve with an average of about 1000 unique pageviews a month for the one year period staring Sep 1 2014 going through the end of Sep 2015
Google Analytics for the article's unique pageviews by month for the year starting Sep 2014

Why now?

For the most part, I moved away from writing about SharePoint on my blog. About 7 years ago I started writing about and designing new experiences for SharePoint at Microsoft. I moved even further from the space in 2019 when I left core SharePoint for a new focus: content design of products that would become Microsoft Viva Topic and Microsoft Syntex.

So, why update a SharePoint blog post now? Because someone asked.

When I challenged myself to write 2 blog posts a month about SharePoint in 2008, so many people had questions about the product. Most of my best posts were direct results of research and development work I'd done. In turn, that work answered questions for clients and acquaintances. I published answers to tough questions which no one else had answered completely.

At any rate, I don't get a lot of those questions these days. And for most of my time at Microsoft, I'd either add the solution to the official documentation, log a bug about the problem with the right engineering team, or both, if I could.

For this issue of "limited access", the documentation has been updated, the product has been improved, and yet, I got a direct message on LinkedIn this week asking for help. So, I updated the article, in case it helps others.

Note about the banner image

I created the banner image with Microsoft Designer which, in turn, uses Dall-E 2 to create images. The prompt I gave for the image on the left was "A tall, athletic, middle-aged man looking back on his memories, in the style of david hockney." Then, I started a new design in Designer and asked for a banner for a LinkedIn post with the title, "A brief detour back to SharePoint."

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Becky Bertram

Owner at Savvy Technical Solutions, Microsoft MVP for Microsoft 365, MCT

1 年

I too get frustrated when people still think of me as a “SharePoint person” when I still work with it on a daily basis, but do so much more! You have made Microsoft documentation and product design so much better during your time there. For all of us users out there, we are grateful for your shift in focus! Whether with SharePoint or design, thank you for the positive impact on so many people.

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