The Microsoft Solutions Sharing Network program started a couple of years ago in response to our public sector customers telling us that they would like to get more from some of the great solutions they had developed...they wanted our help.  This request was for a number of reasons, and they dealt with everything from increased efficiencies through to greater value to the taxpayer who didn't want to pay for similar solutions multiple times.

Today, the program concerns itself with 4 main topics:

• Content - finding reusable or inspirational solutions IP
• Community - supporting the development of new solutions and best practices
• Collaborative Technology - something that brings focus to content and community
• Research - better understanding how all of this fits together

Content is King, of that there is no doubt.  As soon as I start talking aout the program to someone it's "Where can I download the content?", "How do I register to get the content?".  Perhaps the topic title is misleading, we do not supply additional content, rather we seek out the stuff that we reckon may be of interest to public sector; either from within Microsoft, or a partner, or from a customer.  You'll see what I mean as time goes on when I start highlighting good (I hope) content here, and the guys running the broader Public Sector Team blog chip in their tuppence worth.  In our experience, customers do not just view good content as being limited to code, they also find documentation, project plans, XML Schemae, tools, presentations and many other things have value as well and that they can reduce the effort involved in rolling out a project.

As far as solution sharing is concerned, if content is king, community must be the queen  Without a driving force to lead the development of new content, or a joint cause to bring people together to collaborate, or different ideas to break new ground the content tends to be used once and then wither on a virtual vine on some lonely file server somewhere.  This site is an attempt, through the SSN Program, to support a community of individuals that are some way involved in the support of an IT function for a public organization; we also support face to face events from time to time as well.

Collaborative technologies also have their part to play, witness this site.  We also offer a custom portal offering built on SharePoint technology for use for IT based solution sharing for those that sign up for the complete program.  However, collaborative technologies alone do not solve the whole problem...how many portals can you point at that contain no content or have gone stale through lack of new contributions.

How does all of this fit together - this intricate balance of content, community and technology, and when do the stars align to make it all successful.  There is not much research that I could find that deals with this directly, so we are going to do some.  If anyone is interested, please let us know; it will kick off soon.

So hopefully that provides you with some background to what this blog is all about.  Let us know what you think by registering and leaving a comment.

JMC