A few months ago we were presented with an opportunity to help create a programme for Microsoft. The local (and international) SharePoint deployments have had some challenges due to various factors in implementation. For us this was an opportunity to help our wider NZ tech providers to deliver at scale. Noting that the company I founded had a arguably a hand-picked group of people who were multi-disciplinary and we were potentially also opening us for competition.

I see this in a different way, if we have better skilled people across the board then we are able to create more demand and opportunity on SP as a platform and also expand the size of the market.

Glad to also see the positive comments from Intergen on this initiative. Along with Intergen a number of local MS partners have been actively participating in the first round of training being organised by Knowledge Cue and created and delivered by Combined Knowledge (UK) with some of the best trainers in the SP space.

Here’s an overview of what we proposed and worked with our UK partner Combined Knowledge. Many thanks to Steve Smith for leading and helping us put this together for Microsoft in NZ as a test bed!

There are four core skill disciplines required to deploy SharePoint effectively for business use. The four key areas are Infrastructure, Development, Information Management (IA) and End user engagement

Four skill domains and challenges that we tackled was framed as:

What are the key Skill domains, what does it actually mean? What if I don’t have it?

Infrastructure

By infrastructure we mean skills surrounding SharePoint on the network, hardware, directory structure, and database environments. This person understands the SharePoint architecture and can map the requirements of SharePoint’s Architecture with the customers required solution and the technical environment in which SharePoint will be deployed. This person ensures that the database is set up correctly, the network bandwidth and latency is not going to be a hindrance to the responsiveness of the deployment, the DNS and Active Directory structures are configured correctly, the hardware configuration is adequate and scalable and that SharePoint itself is installed according to best practices and the best configuration for the short and long term requirements of the business.

Challenges in deploying the right infrastructure for SharePoint

Many customers make the assumption that their existing Infrastructure people are good enough. However, while many infrastructure generalists know enough to get by with regards to AD, IIS, DNS, etc., they often don’t have the depth in SharePoint to be able to ensure that the solution is designed optimally. Failure to get this skill set right generally results in poor performance, lack of scalability and in cases where growth is experienced re-architecture may be required if it wasn’t factored in through the design phase.

Development with SharePoint

The developer is responsible for understanding when code is required, as well as when it is not, adding custom functionality and changing the look and feel of the product. The developer’s work is most visible and if done incorrectly can impact not only the usability of the site, but also performance, scalability and practicality also. This person understands the correct way to change the look and feel of SharePoint, along with the limitations what SharePoint can and cannot do out of the box and how to properly extend SharePoint’s functionality.

Information Architecture / Management

Information Architecture is a non-technical discipline that considers the type of data that will be used by the end users, the way the end users work and working out how data should be structured in SharePoint. This (as all these skills) requires specialist knowledge of how SharePoint works in order to structure data and the entire solution in such a way that data is easily manageable, retrievable and searchable for end users.

Things to watch for and challenges with IA and IM

Information Architects who don’t have a solid understanding of how Information Architecture is managed in SharePoint run the risk of doing the taxonomy correctly, but implementing it incorrectly. This may lead to the solution not being sustainable in the long run, information being hard to find, searches returning results correctly and other issues.

End user engagement

End user engagement starts before the solution is deployed – at the same time as the planning is done. This phase concentrates on understanding how the business users function, what data they work with, how they collaborate and communicate and then use this to build a plan for deploying SharePoint in a way that makes sense for the organization as a whole. Once the solution has been correctly installed, the end users must understand how SharePoint works (via end user training), why the data has been structured like it has and how to structure new data and projects in such a way (via business process engineering) that all the good work done for the deployment is not undone and the solution becomes untenable.

Things to watch for in end user adoption

Many SharePoint solutions are deployed with just one business purpose in mind, without taking advantage of the many other functions that their business could use SharePoint to deliver. The solution ROI will be much higher if the people who work with the business information and processes are engaged in planning how that information and those processes will be deployed and managed. A good governance plan also needs to be in place so that users know the processes for requesting new sites, new functionality, help desk requests and what to do when their site collection quota has been reached.

Needless to say, that this is a significant investment of time and effort, partners also require at least 3 people from their organisations to be able to qualify for the SharePoint Elite Status. Darryl has also blogged / recorded Steve’s point of view of the Elite Skills initiative. Huge thanks to the Microsoft team’s collaboration on this. (Darryl B, Wayne E and the Partner Team).