Finding my place in the SharePoint Community

For a while now, I have been trying to find my place in both my company and the SharePoint community.  At times it has seemed like more of a Mt. Everest than a small hill to find a spot where I would fit. There isn't really a logical place for a graphic designer in the world of SharePoint.  I was not technical in my background. Although I did grow up with a Computer Science professor for a father. I guess I come by a desire to continue to learn and expand my horizons honestly. So where would I fit.  I kind of got thrown into the SharePoint world without a life preserver.  I was told to help brand our site and a client's site, with no prior SharePoint work to go by.  So into the fray I jumped and I have tried really hard to not look back.  

It was somewhat of a shock to me how much once I started learning this thing that people call SharePoint how much I found myself wanting to learn more and more.  So it was no big surprise to my company when I told them that I might want to do more SharePoint.

They were a little taken aback when I decided to start a SharePoint User Group in Birmingham and went about this without them.  Because as we all know, the only successful user groups are the ones who are run by people who are passionate about what they are running and when the group isn't affiliated with a services company that only wants to use it as a sales pitch.  This has been more of a challenge than I thought.  It is hard to explain to management why I am unwilling to share all of my attendees information with them and why I won't press people to do work with us. They are slowly coming around. It just takes some time.

Our user group has been slowly growing and we are starting to get more and more people intrested in speaking and sponsoring the group.  I will admit that it is one of the hardest things that I do in trying to get it all organized each month. I have a ton of out of the office on my own time work that I need to do each month and I find that I have to put the user group as more of a priority at times. 

And now I am branching out and expanding my SharePoint boundaries once again.  In joining Twitter I have found a large group of like minded people who share a passion for what we do. The advent of the SharePoint Babes is great.  I think that this group of women have an important point of view that we will be able to share with our Community.  And having the opportunity to work with these SharePoint Babes to present a keynote/discussion group at SharePoint Saturday in the Ozarks is great!  I am looking forward to all the new people that I am going to meet in the next month at all the SharePoint Saturdays that I am going to attend.  I appreciate the opportunity that is being given to our community to share and present ideas and topics that we are each passionate about.

Thanks for taking me in and welcoming me to this great Community.  I am honored to be a part of it.