I’m the SharePoint guy where I work and over the last 18 months its been an interesting journey. Many times I was asked to do something that would have taken 5 minutes if I could just crack open Visual Studio and hand coded it. It seemed like I would have to jump through hoops to do the smallest things. A friend and coworker of mine gave me this shirt as a joke because it said it reminded him of a SharePoint solution. I thought it was funny and decided to call my blog SharePoint Toast based off of this.

As my knowledge of SharePoint increases I’ve realized that there are easier ways to view data and open up links that go with the SharePoint paradigm and does’t require a hack in spite of it. My goal with this blog is to post solutions that I find for common everyday SharePoint scenarios. My hope is that the effort I put into finding these solutions will help others while helping me to solidify my understanding of SharePoint.

Some topics that I’ve thought of are:

1. Create a front page that shows news articles in different formats
2. Review of the Active Data Exchange calendar and how it integrates with SharePoint
3. Book Reviews
4. When to use a Browser, SPD and VS when creating SP solutions.
5. How to build a webpart from scratch
6. Technology Stack – What technologies do you need to be aware of when working with SharePoint
7. Getting started with SharePoint – If you’re new to SharePoint, how do you get started.
8. Benefits of Master Pages – If you are not using them, you’re site will always look like SharePoint
9. Updating deployed custom sites / themes – How do you deploy and update multiple site templates.
10. ECM vs CMS vs News / Blog – Why do I support SharePoint but insist on using WordPress

I’d love to hear any ideas you guys might have.