I’ve always been a lover of all things technology related, but in 2006, when I first learned about SharePoint, drive for efficiency with technology became an ever increasing part of my life. This software first caught my attention because a close friend was consulting for the 2003 version, and by the time SharePoint 2007 was released, I became instantly hooked. The ease with which it empowered the end users of an organization to manage their own content immediately impressed me. Up to that point I had been mostly a technology consumer. And coming from the medical community, where I was routinely asked to remember (no exaggeration) 20 different user names and passwords, the concept of single sign on seemed revolutionary!
It wasn’t long before I completely jumped feet first into SharePoint consulting full time, initially getting my feet wet with simple collaboration portals and quickly moving onto intranet solutions and eventually the full blown enterprise content management solutions where I enjoy spending most of my time today. Seeing the evolution of the product from 2007 (I often like to ignore earlier versions) to 2010 has been exciting. Microsoft SharePoint truly offers companies a cost effective and extremely flexible portal solution to begin providing a centralized place for capturing employee knowledge via collaboration and documentation. Not to mention enhancing fundability via a robust search feature, while simultaneously lowering the total cost of ownership for the IT department and organization as a whole!
I see this SP software as a Swiss army knife of Information Technology solutions, because it can be so many things for any one organization, and while it does most things well, with a little customization or addition of a third party tool/feature it can quickly become a powerhouse for business intelligence, social collaboration, enterprise content management, physical asset management, e-discovery and/or web content management.
2010 features I’m particularly excited about include the content type hub, the ability to manage millions of documents in a single library, managed metadata, metadata driven navigation, document sets, multi stage records disposition, remote blob storage and the improved business connectivity services. I hope to blog more about these new features in the coming months.
Entrance Software has made its footprint on the application development market and I plan to help them build on their impression in the SharePoint market. I bring experience from hundreds of previous implementations to the table, along with my strong background in enterprise content management from both the private and government sector. I look forward to mentoring my team of experts, growing our SP practice and helping Entrance become an industry leader in SharePoint 2010.