It’s been quite a while, but no, this blog is not dead. Indeed, the last post was written at the last SharePoint Conference, which was a great one, once again. From that time, a lot have evolved, being in the community, the approach adopted by Microsoft regarding SharePoint and its other technologies, and, last but not least, in the projects I was involved in and the roles I played in these projects.

In the course of last year, I have been working on a very large SharePoint collaboration platform project which made me being away from the blog and other social networks. A lot of experience and knowledge can be shared, and, I hope, will be shared on this blog. At the beginning of my career, I always wanted to share what I was learning on the projects or what I was reading on the web when I thought it would be useful. My first blog post went online in October 2003, on the Blogger platform, more than one year after I opened my website with my own domain name. The experiences I published during this period were more about BizTalk, and SharePoint was absolutely not in my radar. Since then, I moved from BizTalk to MFC, COM, then .NET to finally embark on the SharePoint boat, it was at the SharePoint Conference 2007 in Berlin.

Again, my role changed a bit, which took me a bit more away from the development and technical activities than I expected it would be. The topics shared on this blog were rather technical and developer oriented, which kind of made me waiting for a bit for being back on the technical side to continue writing more in the line of this site. Lately, I realized that, in the fields I am working now, there is also a need to share experiences, and the bell rang last week, when I turned 40 (yes, time flies…). So, what will happen to this blog ?

First, SharePoint will not be the only topic available on this blog. The posts will not talk only about developments, and the content will be extended to functional and enterprise architecture. When looking on the web about these topics, I personally think there is a room for new or additional content. During the last months, I was involved in a lot of functional meetings and workshops in order to gather the needs or feedbacks from users. One of the consequences is that I had to find techniques to capture what I was listening to, and I started to apply new disciplines. One of them is dialogue mapping with IBIS. Another is an extensive usage of Enterprise Architect, from the requirements through physical data models. Just to name few of them. Therefore, expect to see more of these topics on this blog.

In addition to the changes explained before, and as the title of this post suggests, the site and the blog need both to be renewed with a new design, with more interesting content, especially for the web site. Not yet 100% sure, but likely, this would move to Azure.

On the other side, in 2014, I had the pleasure to attend and participate to a certain number of event. One of them was to speak at the Microsoft ALM Day in Lausanne in December, and, earlier, to attend the SharePoint Conference 2014. I am really looking forward seeing what is going to happen with the Ignite Conference. Apparently, this mega-conference in Chicago will be a content gold-mine. Also, because Office 2016 will be at the corner (I was told that some internal build of both Office and SharePoint would be available to some lucky people in the next coming weeks). Unfortunately, for the time being, I didn’t plan to fly to Chicago, and the European SharePoint Conference seems also compromised (just a matter of bad timing). This will probably be the occasion for me to focus and increase my involvement in public speaking at different event.

As you can see, there is a lot to come, and I commit to continue maintaining this blog alive with interesting content, and hope you will stay tuned. Thanks for reading !