Welcome to the AIIM SharePoint Community! For starters, I’d like to thank AIIM for providing this forum for discussion around SharePoint and for letting me be a contributor. It’s an honor to be chosen and to blog alongside the prestigious group of experts that AIIM has assembled. I hope we can create compelling articles to help you navigate the SharePoint world and its many nuances.
My journey with technology started in college as a UCLA undergrad. I was an Economics major and, in my third year, I needed an elective so, I took a computer programming class. It quickly became a passion of mine and when I graduated with degrees in Economics and Computer Science, I went to work at Countrywide as a developer. There I learned how to design large systems, became a Senior Architect/Developer and ultimately, the Director of Research and Development.
Armed with some deep technical skills, I founded a consulting company in 1997 focused on Visual Basic, ASP Classic, eventually J2EE, and later the .NET platform. In 2003, we had a gig with one of the largest Title Insurers in the world and we introduced them to SharePoint. The application was a commission system that utilized several SharePoint features alongside other technologies. It was a groundbreaking approach to the solution and the light went on for me both in terms of SharePoint as a technical platform and as a business opportunity.
In 2005 I founded ShareSquared, Inc. a full service consulting company centered on the SharePoint product and currently serve as ShareSquared’s CEO. I fell in love with SharePoint because, when I was a developer, I tried to hand write technology that loosely maps to features that are innately a part of the SharePoint platform. This included components that handled centralized branding of web pages, audience targeting, declarative database lookups, etc. Of course, my implementations were sorely lacking as compared to the elegance of SharePoint. While I no longer write code, I thoroughly appreciate the complexity behind what SharePoint can do and the relative ease with which some things can be accomplished on the platform.
I had high hopes that I could ride the SharePoint gravy train to great wealth and fame… but prior to 2007, SharePoint was just gaining notice and profitability was elusive to say the least. I lost many a night’s sleep wondering how we could survive on the bleeding edge, consulting on a platform that was not well understood, adopted or complete. Nevertheless, I remained a believer because Microsoft tends to get software right over time and SharePoint had some really cool features, even early on.
As the CEO of a SharePoint-focused consulting firm, I’ve weathered the evolution of SharePoint from relative obscurity, to limited use in small IT portals, to Enterprise portals and now center stage as a business application development platform and ECM heavyweight contender.
My number one goal around SharePoint is to educate people and to help them avoid the pitfalls. I plan to do this here in the AIIM community from the standpoint of someone who has worked with countless companies to whom SharePoint has brought great joy and oftentimes grief. Going forward, I’ll share my insights from both the business and technical perspectives with specific focus on SharePoint 2010 and the monumental opportunities it provides.
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