No, I don't mean talking to ghosts here like a character from an M. Night Shyamalan movie. I mean talking to the other side of the organization, the non-IT side. As technical people, we can easily fall into geek speak that goes way over the heads of people who aren't in the IT field. Imagine you are explaining the difference between hits and visits in the context of a web site to a business person. You might be using pretty standard terms, but does the business person really understand? Might the conversation go something like this?

While we might all be speaking English, we might not be really communicating. There is a lot more than just translating IT-speak into business-speak, and it can take a lot of time to gain the skill to go beyond using the right words and being able to really communicate. While we are all pressed for time, one small thing you can do is to really take the time to understand the problem someone is facing and help them understand the solution. If you don't think your mom would understand what you are talking about, think about different words you could use that would still explain the same concept. Do you talk to your mom about visits and hits? Or do you talk to her about how many people came to the site and how many pages they looked at? If you think the terms you are using might go over the person's technical understanding, avoid the technical terms that might make them shut down. The more conversations like this that you have, the more easily this ability will come to you.

Tech Term Taboo
This is a little game you can play to test out your ability to describe technical issues without using overly technical language. If you have ever played the game Taboo, then you are familiar with the idea here. Get together with another technical person you work with or that you know. Come up with a technical subject or issue, and then think of five to ten taboo words that are likely to be used to explain that topic. One person takes a turn trying to explain or describe the subject without using the taboo words. If they do, the other person buzzes them. Technical terms make a lot of people gloss over which makes it a valuable skill to be able to explain technical subjects without using all technical terms.

Microsoft SharePoint is not a new technology. It has been a part of the Windows server family in some form or another for several years now. Past versions have had many of the same core functionalities of the latest version, SharePoint Server 2007. The differences include the addition of Web 2.0 features like wikis and blogs. The biggest change to me though is the tighter integration with the latest version of Office.

Building a SharePoint site for collaboration and sharing work is still pretty simple. You can quickly set up lists, columns, views, and document libraries, and it doesn't take someone with a lot of experience. It's a rapid development platform for some things including a proof of concept prototype I did for marketing management that took about an hour to construct. The biggest thing I enjoy so far is how well it integrates with Outlook 2007. For example, if I make a list of Contacts in SharePoint, there is a button on that list to link it to my Outlook. Once linked in Outlook, that list is always available for me from within Outlook. If I make changes to a contact in Outlook, it appears in SharePoint, too.

This kind of integration was possible in past versions, but it usually required someone experienced in extending Office applications or third-party plug-ins. Instead of working on my own integration or finding an application out there to better link Outlook and SharePoint, I was able to link Contact lists and even Task lists from SharePoint into my Outlook.

The next step in my evaluation is to determine whether the features that are only available in the non-free version of SharePoint are worthwhile for the scale we want to adopt SharePoint. Based on the reception I got from the staff for my proof-of-concept, I have a feeling that we're going to want to get the full MOSS - Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. One of the components of that product that catches my eye is the inclusion of Forms Server. With Forms Server, it becomes easy to deploy InfoPath-designed forms to a website. Since we collect a lot of information from outside entities, this could be an easy and fast way to build interfaces for the collection of information that can than easily go into a workflow.