On Tuesday I presented, “Getting the Most Out of SharePoint” at the Web
Technologies Conference in Spanish Fort, AL, which was co-sponsored by
Microsoft, The Gulf Coast Technology Conference, and Bit-Wizards.
Despite a few technical glitches and last minutes emergencies, the entire day
went very well. I received a ton of very positive feedback about how the
presentation had a good balance between technical and ‘C’ business type level
content, which is great because that was the tightrope I was trying to walk. If
you’ve never given a technical presentation, you can’t appreciate how difficult
it can be to find the right balance.
During intermissions I had a great time mingling and telling old war, IT
horror, and Cincinnati/Dayton stories with attendees. I hope we get to do more
of these because SharePoint adoption is growing by leaps and bounds, but in the
haste to implement too many people (IT and Business teams) are painting
themselves in a corner or not getting the ROI they could, thus it becomes
SharePoint’s fault.
I don’t think we’ve published our slide deck yet so below are highlights of
my presentation:
SharePoint should become the hub of your business
activity-
- The built-in resources/features should be leveraged for all future Intranet
applications.
- Imagine productivity gains by not having to start from scratch
security/reporting/search/workflow/forms when developing Line of Business (LOB)
applications
- If you dream it… it can be done.
Have A Plan -
- It is not just an application you install and run with - that is the recipe
for failure Business and IT Stake Holders should be involved Develop and
communicate the following:
- Governance Document
- Business Requirements
- Project Plan
- Project Design
- Branding Design
- Training Plan
Integrate it with Existing Applications and Data Extend ROI by
keeping existing business systems -
- Any line of business (LOB) application that .NET technologies can
communicate with can be integrated with SharePoint
- You can integrate existing web applications or use the underlying data in
SharePoint
- Let SharePoint be the ecosystem for your Intranet applications
Brand Your SharePoint - It’s not a question of Fashion or Function –
you can have both
- Out of the box SharePoint 2007 looks dated and plain
- Branding will help ‘sell’ SharePoint up and down the organization chart
- For extranets you can extend your corporate brand to vendors and outside
companies alike
Microsofts’ SharePoint is the 800lbs gorilla and will continue to get
better.
- Fastest growing server product
- 100+ million licenses sold
- 1 billion in revenue in FY08
- Growth of 35% over FY07
