SharePoint is now used in many organization by many different types of people. We have developers customizing it, Power Users doing some wonderful things in SharePoint designer as well as PM’s, BA’s, Admins, Architects all doing their thing on a daily basis with it. All have wonderful tales to tell!
So, my question this week is based around the journey you have taken with SharePoint. Answers can be 1 liners or 20 paragraphs and could include some (or all) of the following! However, you have a free rein to to tell us your full story! Be creative! (Videos, photos will get extra points).
Suggestions :
- How long you have been using SharePoint ?
- Where have you worked – what type of organizations ?
- Are you certified ?
- Favourite project ?
- Key influencers
- What has your role been ?
Win-an-eBook Wednesdays is a small three day contest that we hold every week. The Prize? An O’reilly eBook for your choice! Furthermore, if you win, you also get the chance to ask the community whatever question you want and be the judge for next week’s contest!
You have until Sunday, June 17th (10pm GMT) to answer this question!
My story is relatively simple. I was working as new Networking Team member (Systems analyst with about 6 years It background) for a large food manufacturing company. My boss walked up to me with a Orange disk and said “There is this SharePoint Portal Server 2003 thing, it sounds cool, you want to install this and see what it does?”, I said “Sure”.
I had then installed it and a week later talked to my boss again who informed me the board of dirctory and executives have seen a presentation on some of the stuff it can do, they would like a Dashboard and we think the project should take about 1 month total. We were off to the races.
The scope grew, teams were formed, training was done, research (more like reverse engineering from the database side in those days) was done. Missed all deadlines, was over budget and spent more time trying to learn on the fly.
Eventually we deployed the product and the key items were a company portal complete with branding, new articles, etc. Dashboards using BI (SSAS) and MySites for 5 targetted executive and a custom search scope that indexed and surfaced the Help Desk ticketting system.
Shortly after that I ended up leaving that company and while in between jobs, I was installing SharePoint 2007 on home laptops. It was in my blood, it was what I do. I then connected with my current company and have focused 100% on SharePoint. I have worked with hundreds of clients and met thousands of SharePoint enthusiasts.
Of course as soon as I think I have seen all that there is, I walk into a client and say “Wow, I never thought of doing that… how about…” and we are off to the races again.
