I have been asked by someone working for Microsoft if I could relay the information about the SharePoint Journeys contest.

I am happy to oblige, as I like this initiative for a couple reasons.

First, this is another move from Microsoft to listen to the SharePoint community. Reinforcing the links with the community is something Microsoft has been pushing in the past year, for example on social networks with people like Eric Ligman.

Another reason is that the contest is not limited to technical folks with years of SharePoint experience. Even if you have just started your journey, the SharePoint team would like to hear about your collaborative experience.

To enter the contest, just create a short video (approximately 2 minutes) explaining how you use SharePoint to support the work being done by your organization in one of three contest categories. The closing date for submissions is February 16, 2011.

There will be three winners, one for each category:

• Ramping Up: Early use of SharePoint using a few of the workloads for part of an organization to improve how people share information and work together. Examples include building team sites or MySites, deploying Intranet sites or portals, or implementation of an extranet to collaborate with partners.
• Building Momentum: Consolidation of content management and collaboration infrastructure on SharePoint to drive broad adoption across an organization and beyond. Examples include using multiple workloads, implementing dotcom sites, and end user adoption success.
• Driving Business Value: Building applications on SharePoint that integrate back end data in documents, business processes and web experiences. Examples include building custom applications, business intelligence solutions and FAST search for Internet sites.

For more details, please visit the SharePoint Journeys site.