One of the key parts of my role is collecting knowledge from Microsoft, MVPs and the community on technology and their opinions on it. This helps me to understand what’s going on in technology but also to see what pains they have that AvePoint products may be able to help. I often get quizzed by Product Managers on “is this an issue you commonly see” or “we’re thinking about this, would this be in high demand?”.

When I started sucking up all this information originally I used search engines to rediscover content I found. But often, I found myself not being able to find it because not finding the appropriate keywords or the keyword being too noisy now.

This is where delicious.com came in, I joined in September 2007 and now have bookmarked over 10,000 links. Why is this useful? Well, say I want to find out all the things I’ve bookmarked on “Apps” which is a keyword I use for the new App Model in SharePoint 2013. No probs…I can go to delicious and do a tag filter on “Apps”…or even faster build out a REST like URL http://www.delicious.com/jthake/apps.

Bookmarking

With delicious, I find their Bookmarklet is the quickest and easiest way to get a popup window where I tag things and add notes to the description field. Here is an example of how I tag and add notes…BTW download this from AC, it’s a great document!

Prioritizing

I do bookmark a lot, if I find EXCELLENT content, I will give it one extra tag which is “5star”, so in the “Apps” case I filter by two tags e.g. http://www.delicious.com/jthake/apps+5star.

Sharing

I get asked a lot for content on “X”. I usually just refer them to delicious with some tag filters:

- Where do I find new content on SharePoint 2013 development? no probs. http://www.delicious.com/jthake/development+%2523SharePoint2013

- I’m looking for more information on workflow and InfoPath…no probs http://www.delicious.com/jthake/infopath+workflow – try doing that with a search engine!

- I’m lokoing for more information on Content Query Web Part and custom XSLT examples…no probs http://www.delicious.com/jthake/cqwp+xslt

Twitter

You’ll notice also, I have a “Tweet” tag in the example screen shot above. Delicious has RSS as well as REST like HTTP pages. This means that I can use HootSuite to monitor my RSS feed for Tweets and autotweet to my @jthake account. I actually get a lot of retweets from posts I share…around the 500+ a month and clickthru traffic is HUGE on this which is a great way for others to discover the content I like!

Content coverage

No this system is dependent on me discovering it and bookmarking it. I get a good coverage as I do subscribe to key Microsoft Product Group blogs (25+), EVERY SharePoint MVPs blog (200+) and SharePoint community bloggers I’ve discovered over the years (ranked into 5 buckets of over 700+ blogs). This gives me a daily digest for me to keep up to date and gives me great coverage. I am constantly learning from this!

Other approaches

Other people do other things…like keep a giant Microsoft OneNote (love this product for collaborative meeting minutes and note taking). Some just stick with search engines I’ve been using delicious this for years and it has SAVED me so many times.