At id we believe honesty is the best policy. So with that in mind here’s the bad news about SharePoint projects.
Not all of them are successful!
In fact, if you start to Google around you’ll find that quite a few that failed. All too often a SharePoint project doesn’t quite to live up to expectations or ends up cost significantly more than originally planned.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
SharePoint projects work best when SharePoint is deployed in a way that fits your business and delivers to your business needs. Microsoft were so keen to ensure that SharePoint gets deployed correctly that they got their best SharePoint experts together to produce the SharePoint Deployment and Planning Services (SDPS). SDPS is a set of preplanned consultancy engagements designed to get the right bits of SharePoint deployed in the right way for your organization to use. SDPS consultancy can only be provided by Microsoft Gold Partners who have demonstrated their expertise in SharePoint and obtained the necessary SharePoint certifications. Needless to say, at id we are authorized to provide SDPS consultancy to assist with your SharePoint deployment needs.
The really good news is – if you have the correct level of software assurance benefits your SDPS engagement could be free! Microsoft will pay id to come and do the work with you!
Of course, just deploying SharePoint and walking away would be about as much use as throwing your money down a really deep well. To get value out of SharePoint your users need to be trained in how to use it and how to get the most out of it. They need to adopt it into their everyday work and your administrators need to know how to look after it. To this end we have formed a strategic partnership with Combined Knowledge, who are a premier SharePoint training company.
Combined knowledge trainers are well known SharePoint experts and we can put our hands on our hearts and say, they’re good, they're really good, in fact so good that we use them to train us!
Through our partnership with Combined Knowledge we can provide a range of standard and bespoke training courses and provide a range of user adoption tools to you to ensure you and your users get the best out of your SharePoint platform.
So with id’s expertise, your business requirements, SDPS consultancy and Combined Knowledge training you will be well on the way to ensuring that you won't become another one of Google’s "SharePoint failures" in the future.
So how will you know if SharePoint is a success?
Well you won’t know how successful you’ve been unless you can measure it. Nintex Reporting is a unique product in the SharePoint marketplace, allowing a business to really measure who is using SharePoint and what they are using it for. id are authorized Nintex partners and we’d recommend you use Nintex reporting to measure just how successful your SharePoint deployment has been.
SharePoint is very successful. Too successful some people might argue. Your recruitment consultant will tell you it's very difficult to find really good SharePoint people to work in your SharePoint teams. There just aren’t the candidates available with the right skills.
If you’re using a recruitment consultant to find your SharePoint people you’re just away throwing good money after bad.
The problem starts with the job advert – Wanted (preferably yesterday) – SharePoint Developer/Administrator/Web design Guru. Must have 6+ years of SharePoint 2007 experience, in depth knowledge of web parts, InfoPath, Exchange, SQLServer, complete Microsoft BI Stack, XML, HTML, CSS, XSLT, XML(again), PMT. Confident communicator, good team player, able to work under own initiative to tight deadlines for much less money than I can stiff the client for...
So, your recruitment consultant will try to find you an unemployed SharePoint expert with more skills and experience than the developers who build SharePoint for Microsoft in Redmond. If you’re really lucky they won’t find you anyone. If you're unlucky they’ll send you an unemployed .NET developer who cut and paste your advert onto their CV. You will then spend the next 3 months or so paying that developer to learn SharePoint while making all their first timer mistakes on your project.
You don’t know what you need; your recruitment consultant doesn’t know what you need – let us help you. The truth is the mix of people you need depends upon what you are trying to do. SharePoint is a big product and not everything is required to solve your business problem. More than likely you’ll need a range of people to provide different skills at different times in the project. Our Contractor Plus service is designed to provide you exactly that – great SharePoint people plus all the benefits of engaging with us as a SharePoint expert Gold Partner.
Talk to us, tell us what your trying to achieve and we’ll take it from there.
Building SharePoint solutions is what we do. We’ve spent a lot of time doing it, thinking about how to do it better, learning best practices from SharePoint experts, learning from our mistakes and building solution accelerators to allow us to do it better, smarter and faster in the future.
From our development centres in Brisbane and Nottingham we can offer around the clock expertise capable of designing, building and delivering even the most complex collaboration, business intelligence, customer management and workflow solutions.
Talk to us about how we can use that experience to deliver your solution. Talk to us about what you want to achieve and we’ll come up with the ideas as to how we can get you there.
We will use an agile and iterative approach to development, building your solution "step by step", showing our progress and getting your feedback each step of the way. Where difficult concepts need to be explained we will create a mock up. Where a user interface needs to be designed we will create wireframes/screenshots to discuss.
The quality of the solution we create will ultimately depend on the quality of the discussions we have throughout the development. Unlike more traditional development setups we'll be one team, all pulling in the same direction - the delivery of a solution that meets your business requirements.
Other development teams advocate the waterfall approach, the top down "let’s write a 100 page specification", put it under change control and wrap it in the contract. We don’t. It doesn’t work and so we don’t do it.
SharePoint is not cheap. If you’ve already paid to implement it into your organization we think you’ve made a wise move. The trick is to make sure your users are using it to its full potential, getting the most business value for the investment you have made.
Our first consideration here is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. We recommend Nintex Reporting as the smart way to find out which users are using your SharePoint sites (and therefore those that aren't) and what they are using them for.
Next, make sure your users are properly trained. Training doesn't always mean costs for your business; there are endless free resources on the web and free meetings like the SharePoint User Group, a community effort that helps people learn about SharePoint - what it can do, what others use it for etc.
When you decide you need more formal training, we recommend Combined Knowledge, a premier UK SharePoint training company. They’re really good, their trainers are all SharePoint experts and they train us! We can arrange a range of standard and bespoke Combined Knowledge training courses and other user adoption tools to you to ensure your users get the best out of your SharePoint platform.
We think SharePoint is really great when used to automate your everyday business processes. Although SharePoint does provide some functionality for this out of the box, it can be a bit complicated and difficult to use. Of course we’d love it if you called id to come in every time you wanted to create a business process, or change want your already running, but seriously we don’t think that’s practicable.
For business processes you can create and manage yourself we recommend that you enhance your current SharePoint installation by purchasing Nintex Workflow (from us of course). We consider Nintex to be Market leader in the SharePoint Workflow space. Of course, we’d be happy to sell it to you, help you get it installed and show you how to get started off on the right foot!
We think that one of the most significant launches from Microsoft in recent years is the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).
BPOS is a set of Microsoft hosted messaging and collaboration solutions consisting of Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint® Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Microsoft Office Communications Online.
These Online Services are designed to give you business streamlined communication with high availability, comprehensive security and simplified IT management. Your business benefits from always using the most up-to-date technology that is deployed rapidly, maximizing your valuable IT resources and reducing your need for infrastructure investments.
We are so confident of the BPOS platform that we are using it to power our own business. That gives us unique insight to pass onto our customers. Not convinced? – don’t just take our word for it:
Complete the form to sign up for a free 30 day trial of Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite
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But perhaps the best thing about BPOS is the price. At around £10 per user per month why would you ever consider trying to do this yourself. Buy servers, employ stroppy, incomprehensible IT staff..no thanks! BPOS gives you a big company infrastructure for a small company price and removes the technology barriers to your continued growth and future success.