Back to the Future

Many bloggers these days are writing up their New Years plan. What are they going to accomplish this year. Sounds like a good idea, but I wanted to put a bit of a spin on it. Rather than write out a detailed, technical list of tasks I want to do I thought it would be more effective to write a future letter to myself.

Here's how it works. You write up an informal letter to yourself, to be read by yourself this time next year. In it, you state in past tense what you accomplished the previous year (2007). This time next year, you open the letter, read the email, visit the blog entry, whatever and see how you did. So rather than have a sticky list of tasks, you've got a friendly view of what you accomplished (or set out to accomplish) which hopefully brings more meaning to the meat of things.

As this is my first venture of this type, next years letter will be more detailed and have more meaning than the first time around but overall I think it's a better approach to the whole blogging New Years Resolution that's going around now.

Okay, so here's mine.

Dear Bil,

Congratulations on finally getting the MOSS 2007 version of the SharePoint Forums out there (and killing off those nasty bugs people have been reporting). It's your most popular SharePoint tool to date. Following up with the forums you did a good job with the Knowledgebase as many people found value in that (and you were able to use a lot of code and concepts between the two). And the trifactor was releasing SharePoint Builder which had been lingering for awhile but proved to be a valuable tool for the community.

You finally put to rest a new SharePoint community that needed to get out there and it was a great launch, with updates every few months to keep the community needs met and fresh. All this work was not without benefits as in April you got re-awarded the MVP award in SharePoint for the 4th year running.

It was a busy year travelling as you made your way to the MVP Summit in March, got at least one conference in during the year and then there was PDC. While you didn't present or speak there, it was an important event no matter and you hooked up with a lot of people and showed off what was to come in 2008 with SharePoint. You did manage to make up the year with at least one web cast or user group presentation each month on something new either in SharePoint, Team System, Agile, or Scrum.

Finally, while you were a blogging monster creating many entries all with some content to offer the community, you did find time for the family as that always does come first. Congrats and here's to a great 2008!

Until next year, we'll see how close to the mark I came.