Everyone needs to manage their career, not everyone needs to manage SharePoint

This blog has some content meant for general audiences, and some content that is extremely technical. This post is meant to help guide you to getting the most out of my blog, depending on your needs.

(Alternatively you can use the categories links on the right-hand side of the page)

Announcing the Launch of SharePointTherapist.com!

This past weekend was SharePoint Saturday Austin for 2012, Austin’s first SharePoint Saturday.

There is no doubt there will be one for 2013, given that this was rated to be one of the best SharePoint Saturday events ever.  Many thanks to Jim Bob and Matt who did a stellar job of putting together a real classy event and setting the bar for other events.

My part in this production went very well also.  My session, SharePoint Group Therapy (A SharePoint Governance Workshop), while lightly attended (hey, I was up against Bill English, and if I hadn’t been speaking I would have been in his session too!) was highly regarded by the attendees present.  So much so that I have decided to launch SharePointTherapist.com.

The idea is to replicate, as best as possible on the web, the collaborative environment of the workshop where anyone can bring their SharePoint issues and questions and get answers from myself and anyone else in the community who wants to participate.  Unlike other existing venues, this will be focused around governance issues rather than technical ones. 

So if you have problems in your current environment, fears about implementing governance, or fears about implementing SharePoint, bring them to the SharePoint Therapist.

I’m also planning on taking my session on the road to other SharePoint Saturdays and other SharePoint events.

SOPA Blackout January 18

I will be joining the website blackout that Reddit is planning on January 18 and that Wikipedia is considering joining HAS JOINED the protest with dozens if not hundreds of others who have already joined in protest of SOPA.

I apologize for any inconvenience that you suffer because you are unable to read the promised goodies on my site that teh interwebz have promised you and tantalized you with via whatever search engine caused you to find my blog.

I’ll be back the 19th.

As the saying goes (at least here in the US), “Had this been an actual emergency,” there would be no guarantee that the site would return a day later.

In brief, the SOPA law would allow the takedown of any website accused of copyright violation, without due process. No one would need to prove that an actual violation had occurred, the accusation itself would be enough. While I am careful to give credit where it is due (after all, I don’t live in a vacuum, and while my ideas are sometimes clever, the are often rooted in work someone else has done), and to honor the copyrights of others, any site is vulnerable if this misguided law is enacted.

Copyright violations are a real problem, but SOPA is not a real solution.

Here endeth the SOPA soapbox.

The Voting Is Over, And The Winner Is…

With 10 days to go until SharePoint Saturday Austin, and the Central Texas SharePoint User Group meeting this evening, it is time to close the voting and announce the winner…

In November the speaker lineup for SharePoint Saturday Austin was announced, and I was fortunate enough to have made the cut.  I had submitted two topic proposals, but there were som many great speakers that wanted to present at SharePoint Saturday Austin that each speaker was limited to a single presentation. 

So I left it up to you, my readers, to decide which topic you would rather see. 

The voting has been close, but one topic did finally pull ahead.  So now here is the topic I will be presenting January 21 at SharePoint Saturday Austin:

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SharePoint Group Therapy (A SharePoint Governance Workshop)

This session is intended for Business stakeholders and SharePoint administrators. 

Do your users complain about the usability of your SharePoint?  Do you suffer from site proliferation?  Rights management issues?  Content inaccuracy and staleness?  Can you easily tell who owns the content of a particular site or list?  Do you have rogue SharePoint servers in your environment?  Is your SharePoint out of control?

Then you might benefit from SharePoint Group Therapy.

At the very least, this session will give you a free hour of group therapy, as you will have a chance to vent about your (SharePoint) problems in a roomful of sympathetic listeners.

I’ll play therapist and help move participants past their trauma and regain a sense of control through Governance.

This session is structured as a workshop, with participants interacting with each other in what should be a lively, opinionated discussion of what SharePoint Governance should be, and how it should work. 

Since the goal of therapy is to actually make things better, you should bring your questions about SharePoint Governance and aligning your business objectives with SharePoint, and I’ll try to help you get answers.

• What problems are you having in your current environment?
• What fears do you have about implementing governance?
• What fears do you have about implementing SharePoint?

Participants should be prepared to share personal experiences with SharePoint governance and its absence.  We’ll talk about roles and responsibilities, stakeholder involvement, and fitting your organizational culture. We’ll also talk about changing your organizational culture using both carrots and sticks – training, enforcement and business alignment.

Business alignment can be seen as the marriage of IT and business objectives.  Every marriage has its rocky moments, and sometimes a therapist is needed to resolve those issues.  Perhaps your marriage could benefit from a little SharePoint Group Therapy?

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So there you have it.  Thanks to everyone for your input, and I’ll see you next Saturday!

What’s Your Strategy?

The New Year is a time when many of us take stock of the prior year and plan for the coming one.  You’ll soon see a year-end post where I take stock of my year, but right now I want to talk about the year ahead.

Specifically, your year, and how you plan to manage your career in the year ahead.

As the old saw goes, “Failure to plan is planning to fail.”  So I am asking you to not plan to fail.

Whether or not you are currently employed, you should look at your employment, your employment history, skills, professional activities and job searches as pieces of a whole, your career.  You need a strategy to manage your career.  Here’s why, and some ideas how…

The Migration Begins

Yikes! The time has finally come to migrate our stuff from SharePoint 2007 into the new SharePoint 2010.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I’ve talked about how the existing environment was a mess.  Rather than upgrade the mess, our strategic decision was to use a third-party migration product to copy the relevant portions of existing environment into the new, better-organized one, putting things where they out to belong.

While our content database isn’t particularly large, this isn’t going to happen overnight, or even over a weekend.  There is an awful lot of mess to clean up.

So we are going to do it a baby step at a time. But that means there are tactical decisions that need to be made to allow the users to get their work done in the meantime…

User Friendly

Here is where the two paths meet.

As mentioned in the site description slug (under my picture to the right), in my guidance post, and in my Manifesto (of sorts) (and probably about a dozen other places on this blog), I am both a SharePoint administrator and a board member of a nonprofit that helps people become re-employed after losing their job. Some of my posts on this blog are about SharePoint, and some are about career management.

As part of my role in giving career management advice, I strongly encourage people to be involved with professional organizations, or to start one if there isn’t one in their area. As a SharePoint professional, I am a member of two area SharePoint user groups (one in Austin and one in San Antonio), as well as an attendee (and onetime board member) of other local technology organizations.  I’ve helped organize events, I’ve given presentations, and just plain volunteered to help set up, clean up, or do whatever was needed.  I also help other local organizations by promoting their meetings and events, even organizations whose technology focus is outside the range of my field.  I’ve seen a number of ways that organizations meet the needs of the members of their communities.

What I’d like to do is get your input about what the organizations that you are involved in or know of do to support their professional communities (regardless of whether that community is technical or not).  How is the group organized, what kinds of activities does it engage in, and what have you found to be the most effective of its activities?

SharePoint Saturday Austin – You Decide!

Yesterday I mentioned the possibility of speaking at SharePoint Saturday Austin.  Not long after posting that, I got the official word that I was in!

So I’ll be presenting, but there is bad news too… I had two topics I wanted to present, but they had som many submissions that each speaker will only get one slot.  The final decision of which presentation I’ll do has not been made, and I’m giving you a chance to help decide which one it will be!

Speak Up!

At the end of September, I spoke at Launch Pad Job Club about ways to make yourself a better candidate for that new job you want.  One of the major points was to be active, to take advantage of opportunities to volunteer, raise your profile, and interact with people, whether or not you are currently employed.

In the spirit of “eating my own dog food“, I have several speaking engagements coming up.

Speaking at LPJC, Friday September 30

I’ll be speaking this Friday morning at Launch Pad Job Club.  My subject will be “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.”

No, no boring vacation photos.

Do you remember how, the first week of school, we were often required to write an essay on what we did over summer vacation?  

Being unemployed isn’t a summer vacation, but the expectation of reporting what you did while you weren’t employed (in an informative and compelling way!) is very similar to the essay requirement.

With school starting up again, and with more people landing interviews, I’m hoping you’ll find the topic particularly timely.

I will be talking from approximately 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. during the regular LPJC meeting at the Phillips Pavilion, 1504 E 51st Street.

What have you been doing since your last job?

Jim Adcock is Vice President of Launch Pad Job Club, an organization in Austin, Texas, whose mission is help people who have lost their jobs to get the skills they need to land their next job, and to help them cope with the interim between jobs. Check out other career-related entries.

Donate Your Twitter Account?

One of the ways we have been trying to promote Launch Pad Job Club has been through social media – LinkedIn, Facebook, and, of course , Twitter.  Our Twitter account is @LaunchPadJobClu (yes, there is no “b” at the end, Twitter has a length limitation on user names, and LPJC was already taken).

As a twitter user, your followers are different (by and large) from my followers.  This statement is true for any values of “you” and “me”.  There may be some overlap, more likely a greater level of overlap if we follow each other or both follow similar people, but you and I are highly unlikely to have exactly the same followers.

Let’s say, for the sake of discussion that there is an organization whose work I believe in.  I follow that organization’s twitter account.  They tweet something that I want to share with my followers.  I click the retweet button (or I copy and paste the tweet text into a new tweet) and share it with my followers.  For people who do not follow the organization, I get to expose them to the organization’s message.  For people who do follow the organization, they get a second chance to see the tweet that they might have overlooked (tweets being the ephemeral things they are).

If lots of people retweet what the organization tweeted, their message is magnified greatly to an audience far larger than just those who follow them (and were paying attention at the moment of the tweet).

This is what Donate Your Account is all about.