That O365 Guru from Cape Town (#NadirKamdar)

Proper project planning and process management is essential for successful projects, but after working on SharePoint projects for over 4 years now, I have discovered some common pitfalls, some unique to SharePoint projects while others are general issues that seem to pop up more frequently in SharePoint projects. The following are some common pitfalls and some tips to help make the project more successful (please note that some of these pitfalls has been mentioned in previous posts, and this posts aims to summarize my findings). Pitfall #1: You are NOT using SharePoint correctly One of the first things people must understand about SharePoint is that Microsoft did not create SharePoint as a replacement of their existing offering. Microsoft created SharePoint for fulfill an organizational need, and they were clever enough to create in is such a manner that it complements (NOT replaces) there other offerings. Lets look at an example and focus on Intranets, before ShareP...

This article is a continuation of Part 2 - Please read that article first. Phase 3: Development   In the development phase, the solution is built according to the specifications defined by the architect (As defined in Part 2 ).   The development phase requires 2 key players, the SharePoint Administrator and the SharePoint Developer.  Yes - this is two different roles with two different skill sets.  You may want to add SharePoint data-capturer to the list so basic tasks like deploying a taxonomy and site population can be completed by a cheaper resource, allowing the higher skilled resources to spend time on more complex requirements. The SharePoint Administrator The SharePoint Administrator focus is on the setting up, configuration and management of services running on SharePoint.  Anything available "out of the box" from SharePoint can be deployed by the SharePoint Administrator, which should be at least 80% of the entire solution.  (If anyth...

I published my “ Shortage of SharePoint skills ” blog post on numerous sites, many readers were in agreement with the points made in the article but the comments surrounding the blog post indicate that the shortage exists because companies are looking for ONE person to handle the entire SharePoint delivery. I have a few theories why this is happening. Bottom line, the business does not know what SharePoint is; they see it as a product similar to Word and Excel, so they get there IT administrator to install this product, and expect everyone to use it. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Unlike Word and Excel, SharePoint is a platform, not really a product, and this platform is very flexible. It’s designed that way so it can be adjusted to fit within your organisation, be it a small business or a multinational company. SharePoint also offers a lot. It’s described as a collaboration platform, but this platform offers Content Management, Intranet Portals, Business Intelligence, W...

Microsoft has been very successful to promoting their SharePoint product, even though SharePoint has been around for a while, there 2007 and now 2010 version is something every organisation wants. With Microsoft practically giving away SharePoint licenses to organisations via EA agreements – we are reaching a very unique and rather unexpected situation where the demand for SharePoint developers is surpassing the demand for Web developers. This shift in demand are forcing IT departments and Web Development companies to reduce the size of the web development teams and increase the size of their SharePoint team, in other words, take staff originally hired for web development and get them into SharePoint development. This is currently the "normal" approach in getting SharePoint experts, many IT Recruitment companies still don’t understand this shift in demand, and are not yet focusing in the SharePoint space, some recruiting companies haven’t even heard of SharePoint and...

When deploying a SharePoint solution, the business often place most of their budget and allocated time to SharePoint Features, configuration and that strong look and feel and forget about end user training. They understand that the assigned administrators require training to help manage and update the features available, and that type of training is usually included in the project planning – but they forget that the general, every day users may also require training, and they usually try to throw in a quick fix just before launch. I planned to talk about the “SharePoint Learning Kit”, available from CodePlex , it’s a SharePoint e-learning site with tracking created by Microsoft that you install in your existing SharePoint farm, but there were a few things I didn’t like about this solution, mainly: • It’s not open source , meaning that I cannot edit this solution • Its uses a separate database , so I don’t see it as a true sharepoint sub-site anyways, and installation ...

Look at this picture, someone spent allot of money on a Benz, but decided that they wanted to make the car look like a sports car instead, so with a little extra time and money, they added design elements that made the car look different, the new look gets a great deal of attention and everyone wants to drive it, but later people notice that the car cannot drive faster than 30km/h or drive up an incline without breaking something, the lights didn’t work as well as they use to, you can only enter the car a certain way, sharp turns has not been tested but is not recommended and only people with special training or knowledge on how this new look was implemented will be able to wash, repair, drive or fuel up the car. Sounds crazy doesn’t it, well, that’s what you are asking us to do when you ask for a SharePoint site that does not look like a SharePoint site. Sticking with my Benz example, the Benz comes from the factory in silver, black, white and red, and a special colour can even ...

If you want to give sharepoint 2007 a strong look and feel (in other words - make it look nothing like sharepoint). It involves digging under the hood and changing files SharePoint did not expect you to change, on of these files is the application.master page. If you want to mess around with the application.master page, I say mess around, because Microsoft does not recommend this, (and I am sure this is one of the resons why), make sure the application.master page contains no ajax controls or silverlight controls. Ajax use the preRender event to load whatever it needs to load in order for ajax to work, some SharePoint admin pages overwrite this preRender event, meaning that the ajax bit of code never run, and there is no way to stop this from happening. We know that the following pages give errors if ajax exist in the application.master page. _layouts/people.aspx _layouts/groups.aspx _layouts/spnewdashboard.aspx I am assuming they did this because MOSS 2007 was out BEFORE ajax was big,...