Recent discussions on CapTech’s internal social media platform addressed a favorite challenge for technology professionals: how to describe what you do for a living to those without a lot of technical expertise.  To achieve that goal without boring your audience to tears, oversimplification is nearly inevitable.   Personally, I’ve found the threat of oversimplification even more daunting when I attempt to be a little bit specific about what I do by using not just an industry term, but a highly flexible industry term: portal.

Earlier this year Microsoft launched SharePoint Online, which is part of its Office 365 product offering.  As with an on-site deployment of SharePoint, you can create sites and lists, share documents, etc.  However, SharePoint Online simplifies it all by removing the need to deploy, configure, monitor, update or upgrade an installation on your premises. You can use the Online Services Administration Center to create new sites, install solutions, and provide access to specific users.

Small and medium-sized businesses can now take advantage of the same enterprise-grade technologies that are available to larger companies, without having to take on the operational and hardware infrastructure necessary to host SharePoint on-site.

A common mis-conception about using this product concerns custom development.  SharePoint Online does not change your ability to customize your environment so that it meets your business needs.

Is the world destined to be littered with a whole mess of ill-fitting, barely usable SharePoint 2010 sites in a couple of years?

I’ve recently completed a white paper that details a methodology employed by CapTech to deliver a SharePoint 2010 collaboration portal for an international client.  Blending Agile and Waterfall practices, CapTech delivered successfully thanks to a variety of benefits afforded to the client and CapTech by the methodology (dubbed CT Hybrid).  The full white paper is attached to this post, but here’s a sneak preview of its Conclusion:

To read the previous entry in this blog series, click here.

So it's time to roll up the sleeves and make things happen: your move/migration is real.  And these boxes/files/images won't move themselves.

To read the previous entry in this blog series, click here.

You’ve strategized.  You’ve inventoried.  You’ve cleaned up.  It’s time to answer the pivotal question: how are we going to get this stuff from here to there?  If the move in question is from your college apartment to your parents’ basement, the family minivan might be all you need (and all you can afford).  But if you’re moving from a multi-floor penthouse in Manhattan to a beachfront palace in the Hamptons, the challenge is entirely different.  Similarly, the size, complexity, and available resources associated with a content migration effort will drive the approach definition process, which at its essence involves defining the degree to which the execution of the migration will be automated. 

To read the previous entry in this blog series, click here.

Of all the moments that make you anxious for the moving process to come to an end, my least favorite might be those that include the following sentiment:  “Why in the world didn’t we just throw/give that away?”  Every occasion in which I opened a box and that thought came to mind corresponded to a case of unnecessary effort, unjustified cost, and unwanted frustration.  Avoiding similar moments for business users should be a goal of content migration.

To read the previous entry in this blog series, click here.

If, a week before moving out of my old house, someone had asked me to list off the top of my head every item that would be loaded onto the truck, and then asked me to reproduce that list a week after we moved in, my guess is the two lists would have varied from each other by 50% and even more than that from reality.  Fortunately, my moving company painstakingly compiled page upon page of inventory, categorized by box where necessary, and assigned each item a unique identifier.  This same inventory was then used by the move-in team to validate that all of our belongings had made it to the other end.  Had such an inventory not been developed, I would have been forced to decide if I was willing to sign off on delivery having only eyeballed an overwhelming volume and variety of stuff, nearly all of it s

To read the introduction to this blog series, click... Content Migration for Enterprise Portals: Almost as much fun as moving

“How much stuff do we have?  How should we estimate that?”

“Should we just get a U-Haul and move ourselves, or do we need a professional carrier?”

 “How long will it be between boxing up our belongings and being able to unpack them?  What do we need access to during that period?”

These are just a few of the many questions that must be answered as you decide how to execute a move.  Each has a parallel encountered during the initial stages of content migration planning.