Over the last couple of months I’ve been getting my head around SharePoint and coming up with a bunch of plans that you’ll hear about in due course.

For the moment, though I wanted to take the opportunity to write down some of the things I’ve learned about SharePoint.

Firstly, I’ve heard a bunch of customer stories, both positive and not so much.  One of the things that has stood out to me about SharePoint implementations is that often skill sets involved in SharePoint deployments are lacking – either lacking in terms of depth or scope.

In New Zealand today, we have a general skills shortage around SharePoint which has led to a market place that reflects this.  The first way in which skills are lacking is the sheer number of technology and business people who understand SharePoint well.  What this means is that technical staff who don’t specialise in SharePoint often get asked to get involved in a project where they simply don’t have the knowledge of SharePoint do deploy it correctly.

What sort of knowledge do of SharePoint do you need to deploy it?  Not only do you need to understand infrastructure generally (i.e. DNS, Active Directory, Web Servers, etc) but you also need to understand SharePoint’s own architecture in enough depth to be able to figure out not only how to deploy it today (e.g. do I need one or two Indexing Servers) but also how to scale the solution in the future.  And from my few months, I strongly suggest you don’t short change the future for a budget decision today, as the budget is likely to be hit harder in the future for a complete re-architecture and migration than for an extra server today.

We also see people who are “specialists” in SharePoint, who mean well, but don’t have the required knowledge of DNS, Active Directory and other core infrastructure to know the impact that SharePoint will have on those.  For instance, if you are deploying SharePoint today, do you know how to integrate SharePoint into your Active Directory structure without breaking your Unified Communications solution?

Another area that is often overlooked when a SharePoint project is started is business skills. Often people will treat SharePoint as any other technical product and believe that they can simply run through the installation wizard and then manage the solution in IT as they would any other technical solution. Sometimes IT departments that work like this wonder why the end users are not picking up the product and running with it as they ought to – which sometimes leads the solution to be labelled a flop – but the problem is not the solution, but the way it is owned – by IT rather than the business. 

In terms of business skills there are some key things to ask before starting the deployment, such as “how will I get the end users to use the solution?” or “how do I structure the SharePoint deployment to best work with our business practices and processes?”.  These are not technical questions, but business questions that should be solved by the business before the solution is deployed. The answers to these questions will be far reaching and will determine how and who manages that solution and how it is rolled out. 

Why the skills shortage?

This problem came about for two key reasons (readiness and growth).  Firstly, Microsoft has a tendency to put out technical products and expect technical people to deploy them.  When we release the product, this is indeed what happens.  However, a growing number of our products are solving softer problems than just how to move bits around.  Solutions involving end user business processes, business information and business management must be designed with the end user in mind.  Examples of Microsoft solutions that need technical and business skills (in addition to SharePoint) include the Dynamics products (e.g. CRM) and Business Intelligence (which sometimes requires sophisticated financial modelling).  When SharePoint 2007 was released we focused on technical readiness and didn’t drive awareness of the need to have business people involved in the solution deployment as we should have.

The second contributor to the skills shortage we have today is the explosive growth of SharePoint 2007.  Even though the demand has dropped off a little in the last 12 months, it is still the fastest growing product in our portfolio.  As the SharePoint demand has grown, SharePoint skilled techies have not proliferated to keep up with the demand.

All is not lost.  This is an area I’m working hard to solve in New Zealand so stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks.