That O365 Guru from Cape Town (#NadirKamdar)

If you managed to catch my SharePoint 2010 and Content Migration presentation for SharePoint Saturday, thank you for attending - as promised, my slides are attached. If you didn't attend my presentation, which is very possible sine the majority of my audience is from the States, India and Jhb.  I tried to make the presentation as clear and detailed as possible.  I also reduced all the unnecessary images I used to give the presentation more live so the downloads are much smaller.  Enjoy.

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! ...

Looks like every organisation wants SharePoint these days. I mentioned before, there is a big shortage of SharePoint skills out there, so hiring a good SharePoint resource has become a rather difficult task, especially when you realise that a good SharePoint deployment requires a range of specialised skills meaning that you need a specialised SharePoint team for a successful deployment. Where does one begin in getting this team? The answer is in Outsourcing, i.e. hiring a consultant company that specialise in SharePoint deployment. That seems simple, but perform a search for SharePoint consultant companies in your area, I bet you there is a lot more than you expected. That’s a problem, because you now have to select the “best” consultant company and pray you don’t make a mistake as this will greatly affect the success of your SharePoint deployment and you’re ROI (return on Investment). So what do you look for when selecting a “good” consulting company? Before I answer t...

Microsoft answer to PPI is proper Data Governance. Data governance involves the management of personal information in a manner that supports an organization’s mission, complies with imposed regulations as well as its own policies and aligns with customer expectations. Examining how information flows throughout an organization over time, and how it is being accessed by multiple applications and people for various purposes, will clarify the various areas where the organization should deploy technologies to protect private information. This information flow (AKA the Data Governance Life Cycle) comprises four key stages, within which an organization can construct many unique data governance scenarios to address specific considerations.  The four stages are: Collection : Personal information is usually collected from multiple sources (in person, online, via other systems, 3rd party, etc.) and must establish appropriate controls that uniformly assure privacy policy compliance reg...

The Protection of Personal information bill (the bill) has been getting a lot of attention lately, currently it’s a bill that is not yet enforced, but that is set to happen this year. Organisations are expected to take reasonable steps NOW to ensure that they are compliant when this bill becomes law. So lots of seminars and training sessions are now becoming available to educate you on what the bill is all about and what “reasonable” steps can be taken in order for you to be compliant. So what is this bill all about? The bill regulates the collection, storage and distribution of personal information by both private and public bodies. It is based on world standards and is regarded as leading practice baseline for effective data privacy regulation around the world. The bill aims to provide an acceptable balance between the right to privacy and the legitimate need to use personal information. Personal information is regarded as any information related to a person from first na...

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...

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...

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 ...