Paul J. Swider is an international speaker, writer and freelance consultant. In addition he is president of the Charleston SharePoint Users Group and a contributing author of the new Professional SharePoint 2010 Development book published by Wrox Press.
Paul is an accomplished entrepreneur straight from a barrier Island near Charleston; SC. Paul chases the tides and winds as an avid boater and sailor.
He is grateful to escape the summer heat in Charleston and consults with some of the most successful companies in the world. 17 years of software consulting experience combined with many Microsoft certifications and speaking credentials has made Paul an authority in the SharePoint Community.
Paul has trained and consulted thousands of SharePoint administrators, developers and architects.
Paul has trained and consulted thousands of SharePoint administrators, developers and architects. His vast knowledge is not overshadowed by his witty entertainment when he speaks at numerous conferences and seminars worldwide.
With unique creativity, Paul implements enterprise SharePoint Solutions for clients around the world. In addition, he writes and teaches about enterprise collaboration concepts with demonstrated knowledge you can only get in "the trenches". His specialties include enterprise SharePoint deployment, information architecture, SharePoint development best practices and social media integration.
The Microsoft Collaboration Platform I share some thoughts on video after being invited to Microsoft offices in NYC to preview collaboration software
SharePoint in Plain English We met on a plane or perhaps at a dinner function. When I responded with what I do you asked me what SharePoint is. This is the link I referred you to.
There are some organizations that might choose to use Google Sites as a ‘free’ solution for collaboration and document management. Many of these organizations will reach a point when they will migrate to a feature rich enterprise capable solution. Google has finally published a new Google Sites API allowing these clients to move data from Google Sites to SharePoint and other collaboration suites.
What a great week! Working with some great folks up in Vermont on a deep dive of the SharePoint Shared Services. Great weather, great people and great technology!
As a SharePoint consultant you may have to connect to line of business systems using the Business Data Catalog or Excel Services. The connection string web site has been around for many years and is an invaluable tool when determining formats used for connection strings.
RIGHT NOW is an electrifying time to be a SharePoint professional. With the SharePoint 2010 beta so close to being released and the 2009 SharePoint conference nearing you can almost feel the energy as many professionals are positioning themselves and their companies for this significant release.
SharePoint has become the fastest selling Microsoft server product in the history of the company, Microsoft has sold over a million licenses to date. The software can be described as a contemporary computing platform which introduces new entities. Unlike the traditional ERP solution entities can include content, people, communities, wiki, blogs and business data.
The state of our global economy and the powerful software being deployed worldwide by SharePoint professionals make this an amazing time to be in the technology industry. Each day there are professionals, business owners and politicians working together on a global scale to turn around the decline in economies and business. I submit it is our responsibility as SharePoint professionals to seize this moment and work diligently with these organizations to streamline process and facilitate innovation.
One could propose that every SharePoint deployment, workflow, webpart and document library could be considered a small step in helping organizations worldwide meet their potential. Often times this effort might go unnoticed but the sum of all the hard work from the SharePoint community combined with the powerful software provided by the product teams at Microsoft will be immeasurable.
Over the next months it will take a massive effort to understand the new capabilities of SharePoint 2010 and how those capabilities can be mapped to organizational processes. A few consultants and bloggers have suggested that in 2010, 65% of existing SharePoint clients may migrate to the new version of SharePoint. While I consider this number is exaggerated I do believe there is a momentous task in front of us. To put this migration in prospective if 35% of users migrate in 2010 it could mean a massive worldwide migration of over 35 million users.
I am committed to eliminating my own mediocrity and striving to work relentlessly for clients while assisting the SharePoint community to be its best. I do believe this could be an exciting time filled with many opportunities for information technology consultants to help organizations around the world prosper in this historic time in which we live in.
If Picasso used SharePoint as a medium for branding he would be inspired by the unpretentious nuggets of SharePoint wisdom Cathy Dew shared during her recent podcast episode.
The SharePoint branding expert is refreshing. Her background in advertising and print gives her the command of language sophisticated decision makers yearn for. At the same time her willingness to dive into the complex technology and tools provided by Microsoft make her popular with the geeks.
Her strong advertising background is a huge asset. She clearly has proven experience in what design patterns will transfer from Wireframes to real SharePoint sites. This will be a huge cost saver for any client she engages with. Cathy prefers black and white wireframes to start with and follows through to the end using best practices like deploying her final work as features and solutions. She acknowledges this is key when releasing artifacts from development to QA and finally production. She makes use of solutions and scripts to update existing master pages and is brilliantly aware of caching issues while making updates. Often times she will follow up with a knowledge transfer to clients in addition to documentation (yes documentation) allowing clients to do their own updates.
During her podcast she discusses using the document workspace master pages, using custom site definitions and offers great advice on when to pick between themes and master pages. In addition she vividly describes how a company can get by with neither and simply have a custom .css file if appropriate. When she was asked about best practices for image size she uses the words 'it depends'. She does this often! I love this as SharePoint is so much too so many. She understands often times there are solutions which will not work for all clients and vice versa.
Cathy certainly ranks as a 'A' team SharePoint consultant in my humble opinion and I would look forward to any opportunity to work with her as part of a SharePoint deployment team. I do hope she continues to share her knowledge with the community especially as we struggle to redefine branding in SharePoint 2010.
The "Humanizing" of SharePoint 2010 SharePoint 2010 provides a great infrastructure for building an application directory and profile store using SharePoint Services. In addition the profile database is the information store for people, community and data used for social application. In this advanced session for developers and architects we cover the concepts of working with profiles, importing from Active directory and supplementing the data via a custom service or third party import. The entire session will be demo based usage scenarios of the profile database, audiences, My Sites and storing data for communities.
10 Rules for a ‘Social’ revolution using SharePoint 2010 How companies are going to make the shift from 1-to-1 relationships with their partners and clients to a one-to-many relationship can be a daunting challenge. Microsoft's social computing tools are delivered as part of the collaboration infrastructure and integrated by design with Microsoft SharePoint 2010. In this session we will focus on understanding the widely accepted 10 rules for adopting Social technologies inside the corporate firewall using SharePoint 2010.
SharePoint 2010 Has New Pillars Many of the terms formerly describing SharePoint have been changed. In this session get an overview of the new pillars and how they can be positioned while discussing the platform with your peers, employer or clients. We will explore the new six pillars - site, communities, content, search, insights and composites
15 Things Developers Must Know When Migrating to SharePoint 2010 Note Date Added
15 Things Developers Must Know When Migrating to SharePoint 2010 In this half day session we will review the top 15 things every developer should know when migrating to SharePoint 2010. Take a deep dive into the changes made to the object model, SharePoint Services, Business Connectivity Services and user interface enhancements.
