That O365 Guru from Cape Town (#NadirKamdar)

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,...

There are a few things that I am really proud of, in the work space, my pride lies in the service I deliver. If a client is willing to put down a sum of money for my time, training and experience, then I believe that I should do whatever I can to deliver what the client wants. Give me reasonable requests and timelines and you will get something great. That's my promise. It's an attitude that I am proud of, it helps me sleep at night, it makes me wake up in the morning full of energy. I go to work, eager to resolve the tasks on my plate, and once delivered, within the timeframes originally agreed upon, I have this great sense of satisfaction, that puts me on a well deserved high. Doesn't everyone work like this? I mean, seriously, if there is no pride in your work, why do you do it? What makes you wake up in the morning? What drives you? How do you get your well deserved, satisfying high? I am asking this question because, I am interviewing allot of people lately...

More specifically, assisting the business in migrating content from an old HTML/ASP/ASP.NET website to a new SharePoint site. These old site are probably 10 years old, filled with out of date data, poorly updated, with no owners or any accountable members. When migrating you want to provide the end users with the following Content is current and updated regulary Permissions are assigned and maintained Content is easy to find Content and site is inviting in otherwords, everything that the current site is not providing!! So how do you do it? Well, depending on your timelines, the following approach proved successful. Identify the taxonomy of the new site identify owners of each node of the taxonomy Get them all in one room and prepare them for whats to come Provide simple templates that will help the owners get content in the strucutre that matches the pre-defined taxonomy (define restrictions and governance rules of the sharepoint site) Give the owners time to populate the templates w...