Geoff Evelyn was selected as ‘MVP Takeover’ for the month of March. Geoff tells the European SharePoint Community about himself and what content and information he found or finds useful. Read on to find out more!

Geoff Evelyn

Wow, I’ve been asked to contribute to the “MVP takeover” section of SharePointEurope. So to start, I guess this is where I am supposed to describe myself – so here goes. Without showing my age too much, I started in IT way back in 1980 in the UK Royal Air Force in Aerospace Systems, then in multiple technical and service delivery roles. These roles included programmer , systems analyst, team leads, project management, – all within Microsoft, UK LEA Government companies, British Telecom, Cap Gemini, UHI and Cable and Wireless up to 2000.

My introduction to SharePoint came in late 2003. At the time, I was working as an IT Manager at a college at the top of Scotland and was tasked to help find better ways for students and teachers to easily collaborate as part of a move away from Lotus Notes. This was in the good old days of Office 2003, the early days of Exchange and picking up educational technologies like Microsoft Class Server (remember that?). Anyway, I was in awe of SharePoint then, particularly as part of the implementation process. The service delivery aspects especially for students gave me a great start. Since 2003 then, I have been utterly bitten by the SharePoint bug, and have worked with organisations in development, administration, project delivery and solution architecture roles, and in numerous sectors such as government, education, military, oil and gas, and banking. I am now in the oil and gas sector as a solutions architect – it’s great fun!

Over the years, I’ve gathered so many SharePoint experiences that gave me the impetus to write a number of books, and also to provide a site dedicated to giving free impartial advice and information concerning SharePoint service delivery (http://www.sharepointgeoff.com). I also became a passionate advocate of bringing my knowledge of SharePoint to those new into delivering the product. For example, and without blowing my own trumpet too loudly, I was extremely proud to have published the first SharePoint Study guide for SharePoint 2010 for Microsoft as part of Office 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft Office Specialists.

On the community front I’m totally dedicated to providing information to help others get the best out of the SharePoint platform and solutions. I do this from a from a service delivery perspective and, I must confess, I am a bit of an authoring nut, having penned several books for Microsoft Press as mentioned previously. I also represent SharePoint for a number of institutions and write regularly for each, like the IET, IAP and the BCS. I also like to contribute to Technet newsletters, and I am one of the editors for the International Software Development Journal. Additionally, I author SharePoint exams and courses to a number of providers.

I do have connections with a number of third party organisations, but my focus has and will always be providing unbiased, focused and free information on how best to provision SharePoint to the community.

Top 5 Twitter account

I am a relatively new twitter user and am still getting used to tweeting and ‘hash-tagging’. Oh, I wish there was a tweeting manual that I could understand…. Ah well… I guess I am multi-tasking away hopping frantically between writing articles, working with clients, working with horses (aha thought I’d drop that in!), running events, speaking, so don’t have much time to tweet away as much as I’d like. All bad excuses! I really must sort out more time I suppose. However, when I manage to get to my twitter account I am astonished with the sheer knowledge and insights out there. Particular mention deserves to go to the following twitter accounts, these are my top 5).

* @Microsoft_EDU. Microsoft Education. They enable the discovering, highlighting and enabling innovation and achievement among students, teachers and schools.

* @TechNetUK: Microsoft TechNet UK. They provide a great official source for the latest IT news, views, events, training and resources from the Microsoft TechNet UK team.

* @TheIET: The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). They are one of the world’s largest organisations for engineers and technicians – this is an absolutely brilliant source of information especially for geeks like me!

* @MSLearning. Microsoft Learning. Your trusted source for all things related to Microsoft training & certification.

* @SharePoint. Microsoft SharePoint. Of course, I would be silly not to mention the most important twitter account out there for SharePoint people. This is a great place to get fresh and priceless information on the topic of SharePoint!

Featured eBook

I am a pretty keen reader and have an absolute pile of SharePoint books – and I am a bit of a gatherer (much to my partners annoyance). I admit to having a someSharePoint books harking back to the days of SharePoint 2003. In my defence, I would say its great to dig back into the past and re-read about how far SharePoint has come, and there are great authors out there (far too numerous to mention, low bows to all authors!).

And, because of the significant SharePoint community of information providers, there are many great books, blogs, and articles that are in circulation. I think it unwise and probably unfair for me to single out one that can be called the ‘catch all’ of SharePoint content. That’s because the audiences are so vastly different, ranging from information worker, to developer, to administrator, to architect, to project / programme manager and the list goes on.
Irrespective of all of these, there is nothing like content that explains the process of putting things in place, that really helps those who are tasked with delivering SharePoint, what the process is, and how to sustain SharePoint going forward.

Without mentioning any of my offerings, I’d like to therefore take this opportunity to reach out to an e-Book which I think would be an extremely good read for anyone who wants to apply a SharePoint strategy. This e-Book takes the challenge of delivering the platform by breaking down the delivery into segments from sponsorship through to technology considerations. You’ll be able to download the book from this link:
The Anatomy of a SharePoint Strategy

Featured Video

Top SharePoint Articles

Over the years I’ve built up a steady stream of articles, published on my site but echoed elsewhere in journals, magazines etc. I’ve indicated four popular ones:

Business Requirements Gathering. The process of gathering requirements to deliver a SharePoint solution.

Implementing SharePoint in Ten Steps. Describes the steps to plan the process by which SharePoint can be adopted in an organization. The ten steps outlined in this document, when followed, will guarantee a successful outcome for the client, and will ensure that you have a well managed SharePoint environment.

SharePoint Training Guide. This attempts to examine various levels of training and how they can be and are being mapped to SharePoint information workers.

How much knowledge do you have to support SharePoint? In the sea of SharePoint support, it is very important that there is clarity on what is being supported, the capability of the team and the importance that the business applies to each product being supported.

What is SharePoint Service Delivery? SharePoint is a business platform. Therefore, service delivery is required to guarantee that SharePoint solutions can be delivered using practical techniques and in a logical fashion. This article describes my definition of SharePoint Service Delivery.

Cool tool

Oh dear. I Am going to hate this section. There are so many great tools out there. I am going to shout out one of them, and that is only because of the following:

One of the most compelling requirements within organisations that are using SharePoint, in fact even those that are about to implement SharePoint, is the ability to format and control the content in document libraries and lists. What I mean by this is the ability to filter, group (more than SharePoint group limits), search, and format the content from those repositories, and without having to have them custom developed.

I am going to mention therefore Quick Apps for SharePoint (formerly known as Quest Web Apps) from Dell as a cool tool.

And since this is effectively my MVP takeover bit, I would be silly not to mention the free ones I’ve posted on Codeplex (which is awesome). I’m not going to list what they dobut check out my following listings page on Codeplex.

Topic to highlight

To finish off my chat to you all, I’d like to make mention of a really cool topic to keep an eye on. It’s being touted as ‘The Internet of Things‘ – essentially where ubiquitous computing is on the rise. This is about the discussions and technology advancements into the devices that will connect with each other in the future using the Internet as the bridge to connect each other. This has a bearing not just on SharePoint as a technology but how people perceive data versus their personal equipment that houses that data. Just ten years ago, a watch was seen as the most important personal item – nowadays, it’s the smart phone / tablet that carries our data. In ten years, it could be your shoes carrying computing technology that informs you when the soles need replacing. Of course there are already smart watches out there, but having that technology is not the point I am making. Personal artefacts to humans still follows the data, and that is what is going to become vitally important and have implications on how that data is stored, categorised and managed.

The more I read into this, the more daunting and yet exciting the prospects for the future of how we deal with data and device connectivity. Read this article.

Well That’s It!
Well that’s it. Many thanks for taking the time to check out my MVP takeover. Please feel free to use my contacts page to if you’d like to chat, or join me in the wonderful land of twitter [and help me use it properly! :)]