One of the biggest reasons some SharePoint deployments fail is because they are “SharePoint Deployments”.

The public beta of SharePoint 2010 has been out for a few weeks now. Many people are discovering and blogging about some of the great new features you’re going to find. Yet there have also been some significant changes to existing features. These are things you may have been using every day in SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0, but which in SharePoint 2010 have moved or changed in ways could cause confusion to experienced users.

Or what if you just want to drop a Twitter search into any old SharePoint page, rather than a full Results page? And more critical – what if you don’t have direct access to the SharePoint server in order to install binary web part and feature – with or without a Solution Package (WSP)?

Last week I published an article, Get People to Come to Your SharePoint Site, that talked about the three levels of End Users as we define them on this site. Along that line, I’m going to give a subjective list of the SharePoint sites that I use on a regular basis.

Well, for Office 2010, Microsoft has essentially brought that concept to uploading as well. They have created a new applet called the “Office Synchronization Center”. When you tell Word (for example) to save a file, rather than sending it directly to the SharePoint site, it hands it off to the Synchronization Center, which does the uploading, including such niceties as retrying if for some reason the upload fails the first time. It also allows you to continue working once you have started the save process – sort of like a “background save” on steroids.

I’m going to offer a few tips on connecting to the style sheet you want to edit, not only for “regular” SharePoint themes, but also for users of the Community Kit for SharePoint, Enhanced Blog Edition (CKS:EBE)!

SharePoint Reviews is hosting a contest that gives you a shot at winning a pass to SPTechCon in Boston, June 22nd – 24th. You’ll get to talk with many of your favorite EndUserSharePoint.com Contributing Authors, hang out with some SharePoint MVPs, meet tons of interesting SharePoint people, and probably eat more bad, cold pizza than you’d ever one to consume in one lifetime.

Paul Grenier and I are sharing a session at SPTechCon in June. We’ll be doing a bunch of the Become Your Company’s SharePoint SuperStar! material along with a couple other surprises.

SharePoint offers a lot of different ways to look at the information in your sites. One of the most interesting is the Preview Pane view. Although it doesn’t show up as a web part on its own, you can use it in almost any list or library simply by modifying the view settings.
I hope this article has encouraged you to explore this, as well as some of the other view formats available to you!

Twitter has pretty much taken over as my daily mode of communication. Here are some people and things you might consider following for those of you on Twitter. If not, register for a free account, download TweetDeck to make it all manageable, and then follow along with what’s going on at EndUserSharePoint.com and the SharePoint Twitterverse.