That O365 Guru from Cape Town (#NadirKamdar)

Like many hard working individuals (I want to say workaholics, but I think that’s too strong a word), I have designed my entire lifestyle around doing my job as best as I can. To start off with, I make sure I get plenty of sleep so I so I am fully charged to handle the 8-10 hours of taxing activities. I follow news and subscribe to feeds that relates to my work, and catch up whenever I have some free time.  I don’t smoke, don’t drink alcohol, don’t do drugs and limit my coffee consumption to social outings.  I even try to stay active and eat healthy since it affects my health and eventually the way I work (but admittedly, I easily compromise those tasks when more after hour work is required or the tasks I handled for that day was more draining than usual). While I think it’s important to give your job high importance, I also understand that life is about balance.  So while your job may expose you to stress, it is important to counter that with some de-stressing tasks....

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! ...

I have a Windows laptop that I mainly use for work and blogging, a PC at home that is configured to act as a HTPC (Home Theater Personal Computer), an iPhone and an iPad.  When I am at home, all these devices are connected to my local network via WIFI.  Some of my devices download files like eBooks, while others act as my eBook reader, the same thing happens with movies. so there is this need for me to easily share files amongst my devices and I dont want to connect my iPhone/iPad to the PC/laptop via USB - its just too much effort and I am sure I can find a better solution. Cloud based file storage mediums like DropBox are available, which pretty much means that I can store my files on the internet and access it via any other devices, but I have a problems with this approach. Cloud based file storage mediums cost me bandwidth, and in South Africa, bandwidth is expensive (which is why I believe that South Africa will be slow adopters of cloud based solution – but that’s a...

Some time ago, before SharePoint 2010 was popular, I write an article ( http://nadirkamdar.blogspot.com/2010/07/please-dont-pimp-your-sharepoint-site.html ) pleading with the world to please stop creating fancy looking SharePoint sites, because you are not using SharePoint the way it was intended, and you are creating a maintenance nightmare.   Now, with SharePoint 2010 around, I think its time we re-visited this topic. Lets me start off by saying that SharePoint has improved greatly when it comes to branding, but I still believe that strong branding should be limited to internet sites. Intranet sites are more feature heavy, and those features has a default size, layout, structure and design that fits the default look provided by SharePoint, so I still see a lot of additional time spent on tweaking the features so it fits the new look, and then a lot of time will be needed to maintain these tweaked features. So, when you want to apply a brand to a SharePoint site, use the ...

The NXT STEP - LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT Blog: Amazing Mindstorms 3D printer : Brought to us by Arthur Sacek from Brazil's ZOOM Education for Life , this very well built and surprisingly precise 3D milling machine is tr...

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...