I can’t see why some companies continue to block Twitter access to their employees.  Especially developers.  For me, Twitter has been an invaluable resource.  A wealth of 140 character wisdom.  An constant supply of what is new in the SharePoint (or insert your favorite topic here) world.

This example just happened to me yesterday.  I am working for a client that wants me to write a SharePoint 2010 workflow using K2’s Blackpearl.  Believe me, I am excited about using Blackpearl but it is a learning curve and I want to be productive.   Normally, I would just fire up Visual Studio and start writing a workflow.  K2 promises that Blackpearl can write complex workflows without code.  I wanted to see if I could figure it out on my own.  I read through the “My first workflow” instructions and thought I understood what I needed to do.  I started working through my own requirements when I got stumpted.  I knew what I wanted to do, I just couldn’t figure out how to tell Blackpearl to do it!

Finally, I sent out a Tweet asking this simple question:

I received a reply asking for my contact information and later last night – I received a detailed email from Holly at K2 telling me how I could accomplish this.  I searched Google, Bing without any hint on how to do this.  It didn’t help that I wouldn’t have understood what I was reading anyway.  Holly’s instructions were clear and easy to understand.  We’ve exchanged a couple of emails and she has suggested ways I could fulfill my whole requirement.  I am going to try this but I was so pleased that I wanted to get this post out here so that other companies would think twice about allowing their developers to use tools like Twitter.