SharePoint Forums growing like wildfire

Hey there. I just wanted to thank EVERYONE for the amazing support, feedback, and collaboration on the SharePoint Forums Web Part. I’m hoping it’s installed for everyone and working for you. I think it meets a need and I’ve got other projects in the oven that will do the same.

There are a few emails here and there with problems, but mostly it’s people not following all the instructions completely. Again, I do apologize for not putting together a big dummies installer so people are getting a little lost with editing files they’ve never touched before. Feel free to berate me at TechEd (now sold out) later next month.

As for popularity and growth, the project went onto CodePlex a week ago and has gone from zero to hero. It’s now #2 in activity (just behind the CodePlex project which everyone goes to for talking about the site, so I don’t expect to surpass that) and it’s #3 in popularity (just inches behind the Atlas toolkit, and already leaving MSBee and NUnitLite in the dust). How those numbers are calculated I don’t know but something must be happening (because I can only reload the page so many times a day).

13,000 hits and 400 downloads. With 3,154,273 trillion (yeah, it’s a big number) installed SharePoint customers out there I suppose I have a way to go to get market share but hey, Rome wasn’t burned in a day you know.

Keep on contributing and reporting. There’s plenty of docs online now for installing so next step is to start writing user type stuff. I may not be able to react with weekly iterations like the P&P guys, but I will keep the releases fresh with new features and bug fixes. There’s been some awesome feedback in the forums already and the next release is planned for June (probably going to move to after TechEd since I’ll be gone all that week being a Microsquishy monkey).

There’s an RSS feed here from CodePlex that will give you updates to all changes on the site (wiki, releases, forum postings, etc.) so it’s a little chatty. Also I’ve created a new tag for posts here that will be aggregated to the News Feed tab on the CodePlex project. This is only for posts that concern the web part so if you’re subscribed to my regular feed, you’ll get it anyways.

From here, it can only get better (and I’m just looking at the changes needed  now for the 2007 version which will be ready when MOSS 2007 ships later this year).