The 3 T’s of Giving Back to the SharePoint Community

I recently had an article published regarding ways to give back to the IT community. Later, my Twitter buddy SB Chatterjee tweeted it to his followers, and pointed out that it applies to the SharePoint community as well.
Good point! With that in mind, here’s a pointer over to to the BIT Tech Digest where you can find the article. Let me know what you think – do the same principles apply to the SharePoint community as well?:

• The 3 T’s of Giving Back to the IT Community

SharePoint and the Team Foundation Service Preview… in the Cloud!

{my article published at CloudShare Community Blog – Dec 30th, 2011}

In September 2011, the Team Foundation Service Preview (TFS-P) became available on an invitation-only basis. In a nutshell, it’s the beta version of Team Foundation Server (TFS) 11, but hosted in Azure (Microsoft’s cloud-based storage, computing and networking infrastructure services).  While popularity for TFS has grown over the years as an on-premise server technology, the idea of a hosted version of TFS has taken a little longer to materialize.

As a SharePoint developer who focuses on application lifecycle management, I’m a big fan of doing SharePoint development using TFS. So I decided to get a TFS-P account to see what it was like to work with SharePoint and TFS in the cloud.

To see the details of my experience, jump over to the CloudShare Community Blog, where I’ve written an article regarding using CloudShare as my virtual environment to try out the Team Foundation Service Preview…  [ http://blog.cloudshare.com/2011/12/30/using-sharepoint-and-team-foundation-service-preview-in-the-cloud/ ]

Whitepaper: Best Practices for SharePoint Development & Customization

Last month, I co-authored a white paper with Microsoft Certified Master Mario Fulan on the topic of SharePoint development and customization best practices. It was sponsored by Quest Software, whose specialties include powerful add-on tools for SharePoint.

Some of the ideas in the paper include a discussion on the pains that a developer faces day-to-day when trying to create and deliver a custom solution, including the need for quick prototypes, and the challenges of managing change requests. We also discussed solutions to those pains, including governance, use of design patterns, and good deployment strategies.

I’ll be diving deeper into many of the topics from this paper in future posts, so stay tuned. You can find the whitepaper on Quest’s website, as well as on SharePoint Pro Magazine.  Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

[Update 3/20/12: here’s the info regarding the follow-up live webcast that resulted from this whitepaper.]

Who do you serve?

{my article published at NothingButSharePoint.com – Sept 22, 2011}

One of my good friends from college recently started an organization that provides a mobile produce store for communities in Chicago’s West Side who don’t have access to fresh produce. They’re meeting a huge need in those communities, and they’re serving the People in a great way.

As SharePoint professionals, who do we serve? SharePoint isn’t exactly available on the corner of every urban neighborhood in America. [yet?] : )  So, who is it that benefits from the skills, experience, and assistance of a great SharePoint’er?

One might say we serve ‘Big Business’. SharePoint is certainly an enterprise server product, and the main consumer of that type of product is the large corporation. If this is who we serve, we certainly serve them well, as SharePoint has been proven to be a strategic advantage, cost-saver, and effective collaboration platform for many large companies.

Or, maybe we serve the corporate Developer? Have you ever seen the smile on the face of a .NET developer after you teach them about the benefits of developing on the SharePoint 2010 platform? : )  When leveraged properly, SharePoint certainly opens up a world of advantages for the .NET dev team trying to create collaboration solutions for their company.

Ultimately, tho, I’d like to think we serve the millions of Information Workers out there who use SharePoint on a daily basis. At the end of the day, that’s who our SharePoint solutions are for, and if I can make just one Information Worker come to work with a smile and expectation that they’ll have a productive day because of SharePoint, then it’s all worth it. : )

As we look toward the future, I would like to think we’ll also be serving the entrepreneur who has a small shop using SharePoint Online. As the cloud continues to provide scalable and cost-effective options for small & medium business, perhaps the dream of SharePoint on every neighborhood corner could be closer than we think.

I’d be interested in your thoughts – as a SharePoint professional, who do you serve?

SharePoint Online for the Entrepreneur

{my article originally posted at IT Martini}

On June 28th, Microsoft launches its long-awaited upgrade to its traditional cloud services. What was known as Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) now becomes Office 365, which brings a suite of powerful SaaS tools to your fingertips, including:

-Exchange Online (e-mail)
-Lync Online (instant messenger)
-Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote)
-SharePoint Online (web-based collaboration)

Office 365 is a big deal for business owners and SMB's in that it provides access to enterprise-class solutions at an economical price. As a SharePoint consultant, I'm particularly excited about this offering due to the inclusion of SharePoint Online (SPO), and the opportunities that this powerful collaboration tool brings to the entrepreneur who has started, or is looking to start, their own business. In this short article, I'll just mention a few of the features that I think are pretty exciting:

From On-Premise to the Cloud

Some of you may have given SharePoint a try already, by installing the free version of the server product within your office. Unless your organization has good IT resources, you might have discovered that maintaining a server product like SharePoint is not the easiest task. Thankfully, Office 365 puts those days behind you. As a cloud offering, you can rest comfortably, knowing that trained Microsoft professionals are caring for your intranet data, instead of your colleague's nephew who took a few Comp Sci classes last semester.

Long Live the List

Many of us are used to storing and sharing our tabular data in spreadsheets. With SPO, we can now begin to embrace the concepts of Lists (or as I like to call them, spreadsheets on steroids). Imagine having all the basic power of a spreadsheet, as well as the additional benefits of customized Views, simultaneous collaboration of the data within your team, and the ever-important value of having one version of "the truth" - all available from any Internet-enabled browser or smartphone.

Office Web Apps

You don’t have to sell many people on the value of using one of the most familiar and widely-used office applications suites of all time. SPO provides an excellent place to store, search for, and collaborate on Office documents. But in addition, it also now allows you to view, edit and share these documents via your browser, with more fidelity and feature-parity than you might expect. In addition to the flexibility of this feature, it provides a great opportunity for the SMB to manage the costs of buying full software packages for themselves or their employees.

Say Goodbye to the Yellow Puppy

What if I told you that you could put all your files into one big filing cabinet without worrying about how to categorize them, and still find exactly what you need when you need it? If you're an office worker from the days of 10-levels-deep file system folder organization, you'd say I was crazy. But today we've got to realize that indexing search engines are extremely powerful. SharePoint Search can find your file in an instant, regardless of its location in the site, and can also search through the contents of your files, including PDFs. So, gone are the days of watching the WindowsXP yellow search puppy for 5 minutes while you scan thru your C: drive for a single document.

Make Your Developers Happy

One major difference between BPOS and Office 365 that should please any company making use of custom solutions (like Web Parts) in their SharePoint site is the new ability to deploy sandboxed-solutions - easily deployable custom-code solutions specifically designed to be safe for the stability of your SharePoint installation. This has great implications for those companies with in-house developers who want to take full advantage of the customization options of SPO, but could also provide value in terms of standardization and configuration management for the company that wants to outsource their development.

Business Process Automation

Workflows provide the ability to automate your real-world manual processes, providing better governance, insight, and auditing of your company's activity. In the full-version of SharePoint, workflows are a major feature, and many well-developed workflows come right out of the box, including document Approval, Feedback, and Review workflows. SPO currently only provides a simple three-state workflow, but even this can be used effectively. Perhaps you need to track your Sales Opportunity activity - a three-state workflow can manage the flow of that process by assigning persons to each state of the process - e.g. 'Potential Lead', 'Lead Contacted', and 'Business Acquired'. Now there's less of a need to call everyone on your sales team to figure out what's going on with all your clients - you can check the status and history of the workflows and see for yourself!

SPO has many great advantages over on-premise installations for the small company, and together with the full feature set of Office 365, promises to be a game-changer for many entrepreneurs.

Published at NBSP

One of my articles has just been published over at NothingButSharePoint.com (a very useful site for SharePoint info of all kinds).  I’m happy to join an impressive list of writers over at NBSP, and I plan to add more articles in the future.  Take a look and lemme know what you think!

Top 4 Signs that your Users are embracing SharePoint

{my article published at EndUserSharePoint.com – June 2011}

Have you ever been in an organization, big or small, where SharePoint has been in place for months (or years?), but when you look around, you realize it’s not being used to its full potential? I’m not talking about something big like they’re not using InfoPath for their forms automation, or not using Business Connectivity Services to expose their data through external content types. I’m talking about the organizations who are simply storing old archived documents in a library still named “Shared Documents”, and whose most elaborate web part is the one that shows today’s weather forecast. :) I’m talking about the organization that installed SharePoint, but obviously never heard a good speech about how SharePoint can be used effectively to make their work life more productive.

So let’s say, one day they finally get to hear the speech, and they’re now armed with enough knowledge to get some good end-user SharePoint collaboration going. Other than seeing someone running down the hall with a cowbell screaming “I gotta have more SharePoint, baby!”, how do you know that your users are finally starting to drink the SharePoint kool-aid and use it collaboratively? Well, in true Letterman-style, here are my Top 4 Signs that your Users are embracing SharePoint: