What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Tripathi — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:10:09 GMT

nice tips shane, I was searching sharepoint consulting in google and found you on top :) very nice post, keep writing

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

SharePoint Consultant — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:37:37 GMT

I totally agree with Shane post. SharePoint consultant should have broad Sharepoint development and .NET experience and strong background of Sharepoint architecture and implementation.

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Ari — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:33:28 GMT

what's really funny for anybody who believes that Sharepoint is a cumbersome and unreliable application (like myself) is that I agree with you that the best advice any consultant can give out to his clients is to try their best to stick with whatever's in the box. Venturing outside is like inviting big trouble.

I think what makes a good consultant is plain simple and straightforward honesty!

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

SharePointWolfe — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:12:19 GMT

Love your post. I heard someone say once: "Any monkey can install SharePoint.." (no offense to all my monkey friends) and I completely agree that there's a lot more to achieving the all-important ROI than farm configuration.

I would add that it takes communication skills, business acumen, and a knack for digging up info from the Internet.

And CREATIVITY - SharePoint OOB features are incredibly powerful if they are combined and used effectively. I've never touched code, and still have been able to do some really cool stuff.

Thanks for a great post!!

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Jonas — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:19:34 GMT

That <rant> was interesting. I feel a bit... guilty, even though I am not a SharePoint consultant; I just work a lot with SharePoint at my company (no "official" education in it though).

It would be great with a blog post for common scenarios where you have replaced a custom built web part with the Content Query Web Part. We do for example have a web part "What's New", displaying all recently changed/new items for a site (and subsites) grouped by date. Is this something that could be done with CQWP?

Also, we have built a custom navigation control to be able to map sites to organisational units (departments mostly) in a tree view structure where each site can appear more than once. It would be really interesting to see if this can be solved using OOB-functionality!

I guess there are many good blog posts out there covering this, maybe you could add useful links to some to make us think twice before releasing the thirsty hoard of .NET developers?

Thanks!

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Bakus — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:34:23 GMT

I am a newbie consultant. I have the background of an Livelink support. I am want to step know in consultancy. The qualities you have outlined here, I guess applies also to any ECM consultant.

I will be very interested to know what a consultant's day is like.

Does technical writing and editing skills help you as a consultant?

What if you can't program?

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

sharepoint consultant — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:20:42 GMT

Well said. Anyone who has been involved in a SharePoint consulting project has gone through the same experience.

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Mike — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:02:09 GMT

From the Sharepoint Tech Support Trenches... One year of level 1 Sharepoint Support under the belt, and I can tell you many of the people I help are tasked with installing MOSS on a server (or a farm) and they have NO clue whatsoever. Bt the time they get to me, Sharepoint is throwing "Unknown errors"s all over the place, web sites created by the web applications have disappeared from IIS and running a stsadm for them makes them believe I am Sharepoint GOD almighty.

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Kevin — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 07:11:42 GMT

Ya sometimes the developers don't realize SP can do a lot on it's own and just try and programatically take and add things to SP. I've been in a situation of cleaning up after such messes. Since then I've built a perfect farm and have no worries of upgrading. However, I think if developers respect SP and code and customize within' it's boundaries ie: features, SDK etc..such messes could be reduced significantly.

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Rohit — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 06:55:55 GMT

great post. You rock man.. very well written article on sharepoint Consulting..

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

sge — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:30:04 GMT

Geetings from Shirley.

Only SharePoint isn't enough,more integration and customization are important.

Peter Seale's weblog - SharePoint | PowerShell | Awesomeness - Beyond Technical Challenges

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 05:25:17 GMT

Pingback from Peter Seale's weblog - SharePoint | PowerShell | Awesomeness - Beyond Technical Challenges

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Adan Brown — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:31:15 GMT

List your last 10 projects?

Broker Portal (MOSS): BDC, InfoPath Forms, Forms Auth (Auth Provider), Site Definition.

Change Management System (MOSS): Custom List (some minor changes on DispForm, Add/Edit), Custom Activities Built for SharePoint Designer, SharePoint Designer Workflow, Data Repository

Board Of Directors (WSS 3.0): Standard out-of-the-box "everything" with some nifty XSLT.

Social Intranet with Search: Master Page redesign, User Control Delegation, Content Sources

Reporting Site (MOSS): Excel Services, KPI, Custom List

New Hire Process (MOSS): InfoPath, Custom List, Custom Workflow, Proper SharePoint groups and AD

----- Ten is too many, but I do have 5 more :) ----

What was your favorite solution you came up with? Funny, the shortest one to deliver - Reporting Site: 4 hours of work!! Such a change for the client.

What is your favorite feature? SharePoint Designer for Workflows (I am process oriented)

What type of Taxonomy would you suggest? Your comment is interesting, my answer is that Taxonomy is an organized reflection of the Business environment. The white papers on this from an Information Architecture/Logical Architecture/ and/or Deployment and Planning - are just the tip of the iceberg.

A Developer :)

(Owner of Intuitive Dynamics - two grains of salt!)

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Mike Houston — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 01:07:58 GMT

Great post! I couldn't agree more!

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Akashya — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:40:40 GMT

You are write boss,

Skill required is more then just a fancy terminologies.

Thank you

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Mo Omar — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:19:53 GMT

You rock man! Thank you so much for opening up this topic, it was definitely needed.

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Peter Seale — Mon, 26 May 2008 19:21:19 GMT

Where would you go to master the human aspects, besides jumping onto 10 projects? Is there a book you'd recommend? Or are we stuck with the "10 projects" requirement?

I'd love to hear more on that topic.

SharePoint News! 05/08

Mirrored Blogs — Mon, 26 May 2008 18:10:58 GMT

1 - SharePoint y Web2.0, el entorno Social Networking y demas, muchas veces no son 100% implementables

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Chandima — Sun, 25 May 2008 03:30:45 GMT

Great post Shane! I could not agree with you more on solution providers who over complicate by trying add "extra" functionality to SharePoint when you can simply do so much more out of the box.

re: What makes a “good” SharePoint consultant?

Arné — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:42:47 GMT

I myself have come from a very disperse range of technologies and finally I'm now moving into the Sharepoint space, I've dealt alot with dealing with clients, and must say, I've spent 4 months just researching and playing with Sharepoint and it is still too big and very complex and sometimes so easy to get your end results.

I reckon Sharepoint is not all about the technical side, but how you put all the pieces together to get the tight lid on.