Becoming the SharePoint Guy
Lotus Notes is a “Data Prison”
As an enterprise class Lotus Notes developer I have been following Microsoft for over twenty five years as they tried over and over to create the “Notes Killer” application. I also watched as IBM in effect helped kill of Lotus Notes as an application development platform by not developing reporting tools and promoting the Java based WebSphere platform instead. I knew it was over while working for a major bank and being told that Lotus Notes was a “Data Prison”. As SharePoint (SP) 2007 was gaining traction in the market and had workflow capabilities it was time to make my move to the Microsoft software stack. I was a graduate student at Syracuse and was able to experiment and learn using their 2007 farm.
Migration from Confluence to SharePoint
Having moved on from the large bank I was employed as a Lotus Notes developer at a large credit union. I was part of a team that provided 24 by 7 third tier support for all applications at the credit union. They had issues documenting their projects and software specifications and had recently deployed SP 2007 to address the problem. I was tasked by the team manager to migrate the team’s documentation from Confluence Wiki application to SP 2007. We had no tool so I put on my headphones and did it by hand. Where there were documents I migrated them. Where there were only Wiki Pages I created documents. It was hard work but I created order where there was none and SP search added tremendous value.
Brand Matthew the SharePoint Guy
While at the credit union I decided to brand myself as the SP guy. I had a Lotus Notes email group created and began to invite people to join the group and began to post SP tips and hints to the group. Initially the membership was only comprised of members of the IT group but soon the Project Management group picked up on the postings and joined in. As the Credit Union began to open up the platform to groups outside of IT a dedicated support group was formed and I was asked to join. My responsibility was to support the platform and to train end users, the Project Management Office, and site administrators. I became a Site Collection Administrator and provisioned team, project, and subject sites.
Training the Credit Union
For my role in training for SP I took over a limited training site and built out FAQ’s, training documents, and links to recorded sessions that I had performed live using Adobe Connect. I also aggregated content by user type as well as by subject. Every second week I hosted online a “SharePoint Show”. Each show started with a 15 to 20 minute training topic followed by a hands on open forum.
I trained for over 40 SharePoint topics:
With excellent results:
After completing ITIL Foundations Certification I took it upon myself to train the Service Desk for first line SP support for known issues and permission problems. I created a Wiki Page of know issues as well as a list of known workflow applications to provide special instructions and contact information for support contacts.
Becoming a SharePoint Developer
As I trained the Credit Union I also trained myself. I completed training on SP Designer, InfoPath, and Visual Studio using Visual C#. Most recently I completed over 70 hours of video training on configuring SP 2013 and using HTML, JavaScript, JQuery and Ajax to develop advanced Web Pages and Workflow applications.
http://matthewrubenstein.net/category/sharepoint/