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We all make mistakes. Someone smart once said: “show me a man who does not make mistakes and I will show you a dead one”. Sometimes, mistakes are blessings but most of the time, they are just mistakes.

One of the questions I always ask when I interview someone for a job is: “Can you give me some examples of mistakes you made in your professional life?” (This question follows the question about “What were your biggest achievements?”). I ask that because I realized that we all make mistakes and I want to see if the candidate is aware of his/her mistakes, confident enough to admit them during a job interview and most important—what they learned.

Another smart person once said that “A smart person learns from their mistakes, a wise person learns from the mistakes of others”. I want to share some of the mistakes I saw related to ShaprePoint integration so we can all be wise persons.

_{The frog – the mistake of doing nothing}

One of my customers explained to me the mistake of doing nothing. He said that doing nothing is like being a frog on a pot full of water over a stove. At the beginning, the frog is comfy and relaxed and so is the water. But slowly the water starts to heat and boil and the frog has no idea that the temperature of the water is changing—up.  Needless to say that sake of the frog is very clear. Doing nothing is like being this frog and while everyone around you changes and develops new solutions and integrating those solutions together, you stay comfy on your chair until it is just too late…

^{The Spaghetti – Integration using the wrong tools}

I have seen this way too many times. You have talents at your organization; they are good and smart and they are tasked to handle the integration challenge. And what tool will they use? The programming language they are used to: Java, C#, C, C++, RPG, etc. Most of those projects fail and those who survive are nightmare to maintain. Integration projects are like no other development tasks. They require a special approach, driven from the business, knowing and understanding the limitations of ALL end-points, able to use different technologies and more. Trying to solve those challenges using a 3^rd generation programming language will create a messy code and most likely will fail.

^{The Titanic – Choosing heavy, expensive middleware}

The third mistake is usually made by the big guns: “How to solve the integration challenge? Let’s spend millions of dollars on software and services…”. Using those big middleware solutions might sound appealing: they are from recognized vendors, have nice ads in the right magazines and are pushed by very talented sales teams. The problem is that those solutions require a lot of training and knowledge. Companies end up buying expensive software they cannot use and then spend more money on consulting services because—hi, we all have deadlines. Those projects will hit the iceberg and sink wasting time and money.

So what is my message? Do something. Do it with the right tool. To check what I use for all of my integration challenges check out: http://bit.ly/ibolt_sharepoint