I think here at zevenseas we are really convinced that sharing is good in general. All the things we do (codeplex, consultancy, products) is really focused towards sharing. My personal believe is that protecting knowledge is doomed to fail. I have had these experiences in the past when I started my IT career way back in the 80’s. At that time I was assistant admin for a Texas Instruments Unix environment (big noisy box). Our system admin was famous of suddenly leaving the company to do something else and then he delegated the admin stuff to me. However, what happened? He delegated it but he refused to give me the admin passwords etc., so basically I couldn’t do anything without calling him all the time. He was a good sample of protecting knowledge/information and not sharing at all (I hope he reads this).

The opposite of protecting knowledge and not sharing is sharing and giving people information to solve problems themselves, self care is a word we use for this nowadays. Self care can only work if people have enough information to gather knowledge or have the tools to collect new knowledge.

Overall I really think that collaboration is also a lot about sharing. You cannot collaborate if you don’t share anything :-) SharePoint is great for this and it allows users to do a lot of things themselves. Not all things need to be advanced (developers sometimes tend to think that) and the greatest piece can sometimes be something really simple.

Our product ProduShare is really a good sample. The number one reason for us was not to create an innovative product (one click remote SP install) but to create a place where we and our partners can share simple but also more advanced solutions. Some people will say, hey we have codeplex! Codeplex is great but I hardly know any non IT people that know what it is or does. And besides that, it is assembly stuff and that is another market that we don’t want to replace at all.

Just FYI, Sharing is good is a sentence used by Skype a lot.