I’m a little slow

but I’ve finally gotten to looking around at Sharepoint blogs and bumped into CleverWorkarounds, an Aussie blog written by Consultant/PM/Guru Paul Culmsee.  In comparison to the other Spoint blogs I’ve run across, Paul’s is much less technical and much more strategic.  His series on talking to CFO’s is clearly trying to bridge the gap between technical folks and the business side – a major interest of mine.  I’m adding CW to the blogroll, more to come if I find things that don’t focus exclusively on setting up SP Central Administration.

Tools People Use

I had an opportunity to see someone else’s portal this week, and it was an eye-opener in many ways.  It wasn’t the design that blew me away (nice though it was), it was the breadth of truly personalized tools and information provided by their site.  This organization provides its many employees – well over 10,000 – with direct access from anywhere on their portal to almost anything an employee could want.

Policies and Procedures

One of the other opportunities presented by a migration is the chance to review policies for users, guidelines, processes, etc.  In our case, I took the opportunity to actually write some.  I don’t know how other organizations do things, but we’ve had a seat of the pants approach up to this point.  There are good problems that come with growth and a reputation for getting things done – you start to find more people want to take advantage of the services you provide.  At some point, the old way of doing things isn’t acceptable anymore – you have to start managing your processes correctly or you lose control.

Six Months

Is a long time to go between posts; suffice it to say the completion of our migration and the birth of my latest child have both interfered and distracted to say the least.

So what have I learned now that we are a Sharepoint shop?  First and foremost, Sharepoint is not a CMS.  Oh, it was sold as one I grant you, but it is most definitely not a CMS.  A CMS represents a simple interface for users to add and update content without having to know any programming or HTML.  A CMS suggests that one’s content is templated, sliced, diced, and ready to roll without a lot of mucking under the hood.  Sharepoint is, unfortunately, not that simple.