Hello out there. I thought I’d take a minute to introduce myself to add to the Bio that is available on this page. Basically I’ve been in the industry for a couple of decades and have worn a lot of different hats. I started off in sales, in the “roaring 90s” and gradually moved in a technical direction (primarily because I had this need to understand what I was selling (strange, I know)) and found myself managing multiple technology implementation projects (NetWare, NT, AD, Exchange, etc.).
Then SharePoint came along and I quickly found it to be an excellent project management tool. Finally I could keep all the project “stuff” in one place, and no one could come up with the lame excuse “I couldn’t find the document” or I don’t know the due dates (OK, they still did, but I had a good retort: “It’s in SharePoint!”). My boss, Rand Morimoto, had been a prolific writer for McGraw Hill and Sams Publishing, and approached me about writing a SharePoint 2003 book. I’ll avoid clichés here about history, but after 8 months of struggling with beta software and learning the product from every angle, I produced my third of the SharePoint 2003 Unleashed book. Clients started to adopt the product which kept me busy. I worked on all sorts of different projects from 10 person implementations, to 5000 user environments, and spent over a year as the SharePoint admin for a Fortune 1000 company.
Now SharePoint 2007 is a true Microsoft third generation product, in that it now “gets it right.” Besides filling in many of the blanks from the 2003 product line, it adds dozens of new features, scales better, is more manageable, and guess what – it is more complicated. That being said, in this blog I’ll work on sharing tips about the issues that I run into on a daily basis with clients who are implementing SP 2007, and limitations in the product that are worth giving a “heads up” on. Feel free to make requests if you’re running into specific problems and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Regards,
Colin
