That O365 Guru from Cape Town (#NadirKamdar)

Let me start of by explaining how things were before I became a Manager. I worked my way to a Senior ASP.NET developer with a decent amount of SharePoint exposure; it only took me 7 years. And in those 7 years I was usually poorly managed; • scope was poorly defined and not managed • no clear plan was in place or plan omitted crucial steps • timeframes were unrealistic • no quality checks were in place (faults were discovered during client demo's) • clients expectations were not managed • communications were poor • processes were not followed • resource allocation was poor (I once requested a .NET developer and my Manager believed he solved the problem when he got me a junior network administrator who knew a little HTML) • poor risk management In many cases I had reached a point where I had very little faith (or respect) for my manager that I insist that they present me with the requirements and leave me alone so I can “do my magic”, this involv...

You want a new Intranet, You now need to design a solution, the area you consider most important when designing a solution will probably be the following … A strong Home Page with dynamic content for everyone in the organisation A detailed sitemap so users can easily navigate to the content they are looking for It makes sense, an entry point that is dynamic with content and contains a navigational menu that allows you to access additional information seem like the makings of a good intranet site.  Right? Well, the answer to that question would be yes, if you were building an Intranet 3 years ago.  End user behavior has changed so much since then, that their expectations and interaction with the Intranet is now very different, meaning that your approach when designing a solution needs to adjust to match their new expectations. You don’t believe me?  I don’t blame you.  But the signs are there, and we need to stop using that 10 year old approach when desig...

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...

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 ...

In the past, when a software solution needs to be developed, my team build the solution in the office, tested it in the office and only when everything is built and ready, we would go to the clients offices to install and configure the final solution. These days, it’s more common to deploy the entire team onsite (clients’ offices) right from the start of the project, and while on site they do all the development, testing and configuring directly on the clients servers. This results in easy accessibility of the team, better focus, commitment and dedication from the team which ultimately means faster more accurate delivery of the solution. But the team is moving away from an environment they are comfortable with to the clients’ environment which may not be designed for this purpose, and if a few basic requirements are not in place, delivery of the solution is compromised. So if you are looking at getting an outsourced team to work in your office to deliver a solution, make s...

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 ...

When I use to create website’s, my focus use to be on what the client asked for, its usually the home page, the content, and a good user experience. Search functionality was never something a client puts a strong focus on, and thus, it was never something I put allot of time towards. Why should I? whatever you want you can find from the home page or the navigation menu's, right? The search feature is something that people hardly use, and when we do use it, we not really expected to find what we want anyways. That was my attitude up until last year. in all my project planning, I place about one day on adding a search feature to a website, that’s one day for everything search related from start to finish. It would involve creating a simple textbox on a header, usually expecting one keyword, and a search button, it would have a search results page that run a simple query that will return a bland list of titles and links that will reference a page that was lucky enough to have the keyw...

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,...