Who are the main influencers in SharePoint?

Global 360 and KnowledgeLake have commissioned a study to identify the top 50 most influential experts in SharePoint. According to a post on endusersharepoint.com, The SharePoint50 Project is not a popularity contest.

Mark Miller, endusersharepoint.com’s founder, writes, “You will be surprised by some of the people included. I seriously expect to hear ‘Who is THAT?’ and ‘How come S/HE was chosen and not me!’ That’s OK. The results are based upon how well and how far a message goes towards influencing people, not how many ‘friends’ someone has on Facebook or how many ‘followers’ they may have on Twitter.”

The study takes into account a series of factors, including message independence (I guess this means it’s not a sales pitch), peer references, expertise and persuasiveness. I’m not sure how all this gets quantified, but, like any list, it is certain to get people talking—like the 100 greatest movies of all time, or players in the baseball Hall of Fame.

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Take the continued rapid adoption of SharePoint and couple it with many of the top experts on the software, and what do you have? A sold-out SPTechCon in Boston next month! (Technically, as of this writing, there are three seats left for the full conference, and 20 slots open for just the workshops. And of course, admission to the exhibit hall remains available.)

For those who wanted to attend but were unable, the good news is that registration for SPTechCon 2011 in the San Francisco Bay Area is now open at the conference website. There are plenty of new sessions, as well as many of the old sessions (on document management, forms, search and others that are core to SharePoint) on that program.

We’d like to know: Are there any specific issues or topics you’d like to see addressed at the next SPTechCon? Write to me at drubinstein@bzmedia.com and we’ll see if we can get it covered by one of our faculty members.

Hope to see you there!

—David