That O365 Guru from Cape Town (#NadirKamdar)

SharePoint offers a lot; it’s a platform that provides BI, ECM, Search, collaboration and a lot more including WCM.  It’s the Web Content Management (WCM) component that makes it’s a great platform for internet presence sites and with the more appealing pricing structure available for internet presence, it is becoming the preferred choice to internet deployment. Without any effort from the SharePoint deployment team, SharePoint provides a “mobile friendly” view of the site been created.  In theory, this sounds great, this means that we can create a SharePoint site, apply a nice appealing brand to it (it is an internet site, so the look is important), spend some time on the structure the content so information can be easily found (very important for internet sites), configure search correctly and then fill the site with information and images knowing that it will automatically work out the best way to display this information on mobile devices, right?   WRONG! ...

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...

This article is a continuation of Part 1 - Please read that article first.   Phase 2: Planning After the Envision Phase is completed, the Planning Phase starts, that requires a different set of skills. If the Envision Phase is all about "What the Organisation wants", then the Planning Phase is about  "How are we going to give them what they want". Successful projects (SharePoint or otherwise) places a lot of time into planning, on average, 20% of your entire project should be placed in the planning phase, if you get that right, the future phases is just about applying the plan. The experts needed for this phase are as follows: Project Manager Business Analyst SharePoint Architect Infrastructure/network administrator Database administrator SharePoint Designer Steering Committee From the last phase, the Business Analyst would have defined the scope and document what the organisation wants.   In this phase, the SharePoint Architect...

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...

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,...