TechTips - Top 3 SharePoint Blogs on the Net

If you have ever dealt with SharePoint 2003, 2007 or 2010 then you know that it can be quite a chore to administer. Well there are some valuable resources on the net to help you with your SharePoint and quite a few experts out there that are more than willing to share their knowledge. I have compiled a list of three SharePoint Blogs that you need to bookmark now!

I visit these three blogs quite frequently, I found these three and decided they were the top 3 because every time I had a SharePoint problem and plugged it into Google, these three sites were almost always at the top of the list of links returned. I have solved many problems within SharePoint thanks largely in part to these three blogs. I have ranked them in no particular order, I think they are all very good sites and all rank right alongside each other.

Joel Oleson's Blog - SharePoint Land and also now on Joel Oleson's Blog

I like Joel's site because it's loaded with information about different SharePoint ideas, development, and helpful sites that can assist you with your administration of SharePoint. In addition to all of the links and info provided Joel also writes a lot of helpful posts about the admin of SharePoint and some errors you might run into.

One of my all time favorite and most helpful articles I have read by Joel is the one about SharePoint service account password resets. Joel is a very good writer and makes the information easy to process and explains not only how to perform the tasks but what they do and how they work.

Joel's blog is a very good one about SharePoint by someone who knows the ins and outs of the program very well. I would suggest if you want to stay up to date on SharePoint, new tools and new resources to help you administer your SharePoint setup then bookmark Joel's Blog.

SharePoint Automation - Gary Lapointe

This Blog is one of the best resources on the net for helping to automate your SharePoint setup (hence the name of the blog). Gary focuses a lot on the powerful tool STSADM that can be used to do almost anything in SharePoint 2007 and 2010. The Blog is full of links to helpful STSADM commands, what the commands do and some great scripts using the STSADM tool.

This is the site where I found the script that helped me to automate my service account and AppPool resets, which in turn saved me about an hour a month!

The site is easy to navigate and has loads of information about STSADM and SharePoint in general. He recently has been working a lot in SharePoint 2010 and has some really good posts on scripts that can be used with SharePoint 2010. So anyone working a lot with SharePoint 2010 might want to check out his Blog.

Gary's Blog has several hundred posts over the last few years and nearly all of them have useful info about administrating the SharePoint monster. He has helped me with so many tasks within SharePoint that used to be time consuming via the user interface and are now a simple script that I run. I suggest anyone who wants to learn to save time in SharePoint bookmark his page now!

Bill Baer - TechNet Blog

Bill's blog focuses right now mainly on upgrading from older versions of SharePoint to the newest 2010 version. His guides offer some insight into the upgrade process and a lot of the pitfalls you might run into and how to avoid them. Bill is an informative writer with an easy to follow style.

I also like that he provides links along the right hand side of his page to some popular tools for SharePoint, popular bloggers about SharePoint, and loads of other SharePoint resources. I like that he incorporates a lot of screen shots and visual aids with his posts. I like to see things like they should be on my screen as I work through issues, it makes me know (or at least think) I am doing it right.

Bill's blog is a great resource for SharePoint admin in 2007 and 2010, specifically anyone who is working on an upgrade from 2007 to 2010. This is the reason you should bookmark his page now!

Other Blogs that get the honorable mention tag are listed below. All are very good resources that can give you some great info and help you out with your task of administrating the monster that is SharePoint.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/ - Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/ - SharePoint Designer Team Blog

http://sharepoint.mindsharpblogs.com/PaulS/default.aspx - Paul Stork

I hope these sites help you out the way they have helped me in my quest to try to admin my SharePoint Setup.