That O365 Guru from Cape Town (#NadirKamdar)

Up until the start of this year, I have been working for small consultancy companies.  While I have always enjoyed the flexibility of this environment, I have never really had strong exposure to large organisations until now. The company I work for has been acquired by a much larger organisation, meaning that I am now part of a big company.  It’s been three months since the acquisition, and while the transition is still taking place, I am already noticing a shift in my thinking.  I would like to share this with you, and maybe add on to this post as more differences are identified. Before I continue, I just need to add that the points below are not necessary points from the company I work in.  I have been in this industry for a long time, and have built relationships with all kinds of people in different positions and companies (including my competitors) and have managed to pick up some consistencies and facts worth mentioning.  Some of these points are...

Developers love to code and hate to write documents, but documents are important in IT.   We need documents to define how the solution will be built so that coders who enter the scene later in the project can easily catch up.  We need operational and training manuals so the people who are looking after the solution are aided in doing it right, we also need numerous project management related documents but today, I want to focus on those documents that are more technical in nature, and somehow ends up on the coders lap, who usually has no idea how to handle this responsibility. Firstly, let’s start off by saying that document writing is a skill; it’s a valuable skill that coders should embrace rather than avoid.  It may take you away from your comfort zone, but building this skill alone will helps you advance your career to the next level.  So give this responsibility proper attention and you will see the rewards. But how does one write good technical documents?...

When we look at the minimum resources needed for a SharePoint environment, we think SharePoint administrator and maybe the “can-do-it-all” SharePoint Developer.    Don’t get me wrong, these resources are great and are vital for the stability and growth of the SharePoint environment, but they are essentially the workers, or the term I like using, the brick layers (don’t take it as an offensive term, that’s not my intention), they have a strong focus on the technical component of the SharePoint environment, and although they can achieve greatness on their own, they can achieve so much more if they had guidance from someone with a broad understanding of SharePoint (not necessary focused on the technical side) with the ability to map a business problem to the SharePoint technology, that can engage with the business user and plan an approach that will achieve the greatness that SharePoint can provide.  They are the SharePoint Architect. The reason why I am focusing on this r...

While a new version of SharePoint did not come out in the year 2011, it does not mean that nothing happened in that year.  This post will highlight the key achievements of SharePoint in the year 2011 and also my predictions in the year 2012. The phase out of SharePoint 2007 :  SharePoint 2010 was introduced in the 2nd half of 2010.  The year 2011, started the phase out of SharePoint 2007 and the phase in of SharePoint 2010 – this is evident when you look for SharePoint training currently available.  At the start of 2011, Good (or any) SharePoint 2010 training was few and expensive, and now, at the end of 2011, SharePoint 2007 training has been completely phased out. Using SharePoint better :  People loved SharePoint 2007, but they were not using it correctly, which introduced many pitfalls, as mentioned in my blog post written exactly one year ago  ( http://nadirkamdar.blogspot.com/2010/12/common-pitfalls-in-sharepoint-projects.html ) .  The year...

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! ...