With his consultancy Quest, the emphasis is much more "community-based". The international community holds regular semi-formal information exchange sessions around the world, known as SharePoint Saturdays.

The community emphasis is usually associated with open-source rather than proprietary products, but SharePoint lends itself to such a mode of support, Oleson says.

People have come away from their first SharePoint Saturday "saying 'if I'd known that [technical hint just discussed], I could have saved months of work'."

The growth of social media has strengthened awareness of user communities, he says. SharePoint itself now has a Twitter-like "status" feature, where team members can keep one another up to date with what tasks are under way and who is meeting with whom.

"The feedback loop is a lot quicker now. We can filter out the noise and [decide] these are the problems; these are common solutions; these are best practices."