My name is Russ Houberg (queue the Knight Rider music...OK, don't). 

I've been serving clients as a SharePoint developer/architect for several years now.  I've tinkered around with blog posts in the past but they were always broad topics.  My goal is to focus this blog directly on my experiences with SharePoint.  I don't claim to know it all.  In fact, much of what you find here will be my take on what I've learned from others.  The rest will be the results of my actual successes and failures.

For the last 3+ years, I've been a technical architect for a great company called KnoweldgeLake.  In addition to having an amazing management team, my coworkers are an excellent group of professionals.  In my role at KL, I've specialized in SharePoint architecture particularly from the point of view of scalability.  I've experienced many of the documented and undocumented features and limitations of this extremely versatile platform. 

I say platform for a reason.  SharePoint in many ways is a blank slate framework on which you can build just about any web driven technology.  In our case, we choose to implement it as a document imaging repository.  That puts us squarely in competition with products like FileNet (IBM), Documentum, Captiva and Legato.  But we have something that these guys don't have...a FREE yet fully functional storage repository called Windows SharePoint Services 3.0!  So back in 2003 we used our extensive experience in the ECM industry to layer a high quality set of capture and imaging tools on top of SharePoint.  Just like that, we began pushing the ECM boundaries in SharePoint.

So before I get flogged for touting the company wares, I do have a point.  SharePoint is what you make it to be.  Whether you use it as a corporate intranet, team collaboration system, report center, or a document imaging repository, there is always a common theme.  We put content into the system with the expectation that it's easy to get it back out.  That's where I come in.  I'm all about the scalability and index/search aspects of SharePoint.  If SharePoint can't provide you with what you're looking for quickly and easily, then I haven't done my job.  It doesn't matter how much content you have.  Whether it's just a handful of static content or 50 terabytes of content collected over the last 20 years.  SharePoint can handle it with the proper architecture.

By the way, kudos to SharePoint Experts for hosting this blog site and for putting together some fantastic training.  I've experienced their training, it's excellent stuff!  KL is having Todd Baginski come in and do the Development Bootcamp next week.  I can't wait!

So, keep an eye out.  I hope you'll find some interesting stuff in this blog!