My first IT job was part-time in 1989 assembling IBM XT PC’s so I am officially old. I remember seeing a 30MB hard disk (about the size of a brick) and thinking, wow how will you fill that’!  I also knew life before this world of Windows that we now live in.

After graduating university, I left home to work for a mining company in tech support in 1991, before returning to Perth working in various roles moving from support to sysadmin to infrastructure manager. Got my MCSE in NT4 in 1998 and subsequently Win2k. Also in 1998 put in the PCDOCS document management system for a mid-sized company of 600 staff. In 2000 I working for an ISP so was heavily into Cisco (CCNP) and discovered the joys of the Debian linux distro. Also during this time I decided it was time I learned to code so I wrote a freeware program called EZ-Rent for Australian property investors. Later I worked for a company that owned a security and web hosting business so I certified CISSP and got to perform fun things like pen-testing network and systems.

That’s a pretty wide ranging background – how did it lead you to SharePoint?

The first version of SharePoint 2001 I skipped because I thought it was laughable, but you have to remember I put in PCDOCS (now Hummingbird) a couple of years prior. SharePoint 2003 I did work on extensively for an organisation that managed to throw away the file server. Additionally I had to manage SharePoint for the hosting organisation who I mentioned before.

When I first saw the 2007 version, I instantly know it was going to be mega-huge, and I instantly knew that it was going to monumentally screwed up for many implementations. So being opportunistic, greedy and somewhat ahead of the curve, I decided to specialise in it.

So you admit it was opportunistic – would you call yourself a SharePoint fan?

I felt that my skills and background combined nicely for such a product. I can code, I have 19 years of infrastructure across various disciplines and in being a SharePoint “specialist”, I have had to call on pretty much everything I learned across my career. I would not call myself a fan though, because after this long in IT, you either end up very bitter and twisted or really pragmatic. I like to think I am not completely bitter and twisted just yet.

Besides, my blog (cleverworkarounds.com) is powered by wordpress and my web site is joomla. My attitude to technology Arno is very much like yours in this regard.

Have you had to learn any new skills to produce good SharePoint outcomes?

God yes! I originally thought that I had the right sort of skills base to be a SharePoint specialist. But over and above being an IT generalist I have had to read all sorts of obscure crap to learn all sorts of ’soft’ skills. In fact its those soft skills, like training and facilitation that has been more valuable than my old tech/dev stomping ground. So you could argue that now by focussing on SharePoint, I’m even more of a generalist than before!

You’ll be speaking at the SharePoint Best Practices conference San Diego in Feb 09. What sort of topic areas will you be covering?

Well my interest area these days is in SharePoint head-space – tech stuff has been my bread and butter for so long but it just doesn’t push my buttons the way it used to. So I am deliberately not speaking on technical matters. I have two presentations that I think are quite timely. One delving into SharePoint return on investment and the other I am going to be talking about my secret sauce – the one single skill that I spent a lot of effort this year learning that has made the difference in all my SharePoint gigs around the place.

I’ll also be on an expert panel with some people I have huge respect for so looking forward to that.

Secret sauce – care to give us a hint?

Ah – that would be telling! Best to go to the conference to find out!

Fair enough – who are you currently employed by?

I’m self employed. In fact 5 colleagues and I formed an advisory/implementation consultancy called Seven Sigma Business Solutions. www.sevensigma.com.au. SharePoint features heavily of course, but we also have skills in other areas that we consult on as well like enterprise network monitoring, security, training and facilitation..

“Seven Sigma” – is that some sort of reference to Six Sigma process improvement?

Pretty much. Six Sigma for those that don’t know is a statistical term that represents 3.5 defects per million repetitions of a process. It’s basically a goal to strive to in relation to improving performance and reducing wastage.

The name “seven sigma” is really a reflection of my warped sense of humour. It is bit of a joke on the whole methodology fanboy thing and appealed to me for 2 main reasons.

1. If 6 sigma is 3.5 defects per million then 7 sigma will be something like 1 defect per ten billion, so I figured, why stop at 6?
2. Tech geeks do not get the joke and they normally delight on in-jokes.

What do you think is the best thing about SharePoint?

The fact that it is a flexible platform that allows you to use it for various different solutions

And the worst thing?

The fact that it is a flexible platform that allows you to use it for various different solutions

Seriously though, I think it is the fact that it is simply too easy to do the “wrong” thing with SharePoint. Most new products have this sort of phase in their life cycle as people come to grips with them and the early adopters crash and burn while the smart hang back and learn from those experiences. SharePoint’s has been in a particularly long phase like this and I think will continue for some time yet.

People comment that you have an interesting writing style – you use a lot of humour and some interesting pop-culture references

Yeah – Brittany Spears cops it a bit, and I like using the metal band Opeth too. Most of all though, I like to use IT stereotypes which is always fun. I mean come on – we all know that web developers are rampantly metrosexual and hard core systems engineers have that certain “tech guy” body odour

Let’s face it, a lot of the SharePoint topics are actually pretty boring. The same goes with a lot of academic stuff that I read. I just try and keep it interesting for the reader so it’s not too monotonous. Plus since I tend to write waffly and wordy posts, I need something to keep people from falling asleep! For what its worth I still haven’t yet had a cease and desist from Matt Groening’s legal team

Speaking of the Simpsons, when will the “Tribute to the leave form” series of articles be finished?

Probably never! I think by the time I am done there will be 12+ articles for that one! What was I thinking!!

Bjorn, first tell me a bit about yourself? Who are you and why should people listen to what you say?

My name is Bjørn, and I’m a SharePointholic. I’ve been in IT since I can remember, but started my professional career in 1993. Since then I have worked on both the admin and developer side of the fence.

I set up my first SharePoint installation for my own company in 2001 and have since installed countless SharePoints, ranging from small fire-and-forget team sites to completely customized massive portals.

However, I didn’t really get into the SharePoint developer thing until WSS3 came out. I started writing webparts and stuff for WSS2 but never liked the development experience.

As to why people should listen, I have no idea. Perhaps because I am passionate about what I do and in addition passionate about writing about what I do. That passion means I put a lot of time and energy into continualy improving and learning.

People seem to appreciate what I write based on feedback and blog readership, and if they can learn something from it, thats even better.

What will the topic of the book?

The book will be focused on understanding the architecture of SharePoint from a user experience perspective. It will be a book for architects, developers, and designers who want to truly understand the architecture of SharePoint and how they can apply that to create great user experiences.

Will this be another CSS/master pages book then?

Ah, no, by all means, no. I make a clear distinction between experience and interface here. The user interface is just a small part of the experience. Other factors such as functionality of pages, content types, working with email on lists, and modifying the authoring experience are all part of the user experience. At the time of this writing I have written about one third of the content for the book and I have written less than two full paragraphs relating to design, css and master pages.

I make no attempt to teach people css or html, and there is no need to know any of that stuff to learn everything that is in the book.

Who will be the primary audience?

Everyone! Buy one for each of your friends, and two for yourself!

Jokes aside, the book is primarily for SharePoint developers who are familiar with the basics but want to learn more and go deeper into SharePoint architecture. You should know your master page theory, but you don’t need to know the CAML required to create a list from scratch. You will after you have read the book, though.

The secondary audience will be architects, developers, and designers who seek to better understand the options for enhancing the user experience and thus be a better resource for others who may not know all the nitti-gritty details of what is possible.

Ok, so tell me a bit more about the actual contents.

The book will be divided into three sections or parts. The first part will focus on getting the bare minimum of SharePoint knowledge down, such as basic feature design and CAML/XML basics. The second part is a deep dive into the core of SharePoint, going from the site itself down to inner workings of custom fields. Then, in the third section, we put all that knowledge into creating a new solution from bottom up.

I am also trying to focus on unique knowledge and stay away from what has already been written in other books. Of course, there will always be overlaps, but much of what I write I have yet to find described anywhere else.

Can you give some examples of unique content?

Sure! For example I have yet to find any books that explains the steps, or actually step singular, required to email enable a custom list. Anyone can click the ‘Email enable this list’ for a document library or several other list template types, but that does not work for custom list, or a number of other lists. In the book I explain how email enabling works down to reading the reflected source code of SharePoint, and then explain how to email enable custom lists using only a single line of code.

I also take the time to test every attribute and feature of definitions to verify the official documentation. Sadly there are many examples where the documentation is either lacking or even plain wrong. I make a note in the text every time I find something like this and document the findings by showing reflected source code as well examples.

How does the article series “Customizing the user experience” fit into all this?

The article series actually came first, I only started thinking about the book after I saw that I would never be able to fit everything I wanted into an online series.

The online series stands on its own, and you can learn plenty from just reading that and never read the book. If you do get the book, however, you fill find tons of more information on each topic. I have had to prioritize and cut content from the online series in order to remain sanely short.

If you compare the first part, which is the longest article I have written online, the book chapter for the same topic is about three times as long. The “Lists and list templates” part is almost ten times as long in the book because I can go deeper and cover more ground.

Why would this book be any different than other books on SharePoint?

I focus highly on also creating a great reading experience by trying to tell a story while explaining the technical details. When I start a new chapter I first create the story, which often has absolutely nothing to do with the contents of the chapter itself. For instance, chapter 7, which details lists, list forms, and views, the story revolves around a journey through a forest searching for a hidden monster that lives in a cave.

A monster?

Hehe, yeah, I’ve spoken to many a SharePoint developer who are trying to create views from scratch. It is quite often painful and many have ‘fallen’ to the beast, running out of the room while cursing SharePoint and the day Bill Gates was born.

Sounds more like a fairy tale than a SharePoint book

Perhaps, but there is very little direct story telling here. I use humor and other literary tools to hopefully make the reading a bit more enjoyable. I write the story first to set the mood and pace for different sections of the chapter. I realize that people will buy Tolkien books if they want to read stories, so 99% of the content is still pure technical skill building. The story is just as much a tool for me in writing a chapter as it will be for the reader. If it’s not fun for me to write it sure as heck won’t be any fun to read.

The message in chapter 7 is: “Don’t go into the cave unless you are prepared, and the weapons you choose are the knowledge you gain. ”

I was also thinking of having the chapter on fields and columns take the reader into the role of a private investigator in a murder mystery, complete with femme fatales and gunfights, trying to find out what killed the text field type. I figured a lot of the readers like RPGs so they might appreciate being part of the book rather than just observing. I still have to get that past my editor, though, he might not see the fun that I do.

Why do you write so much?

Heh, I love to write, but more importantly I want to participate in the community, be part of the experience in a manner of speaking. There’s a certain mentality in Norway called Jante that frowns upon anyone who stands out. I hate that mentality and hopefully by contributing to the community and showing what can be done if one participates I can inspire others to be more active as well. In the long run this means more people on the scene and by random chance alone at least some of them will be good and teach me something new

So you are not making any money off this?

Not directly, no. I do get royalties from the book, but not nearly the same as I would have made had I put the same amount of work into customer projects. However, demonstrating skill and being visible is a great way of getting attention, and I have noticed a rise in requests for my time.

Why did you choose to write for SharePoint Magazine?

It was just a stroke of luck I guess. I had an idea for my first article on runtime modification of components and had begun writing for my own blow when I happened to stumble across the then unlaunched SharePoint Magazine web site. I shot off an email to you and you accepted. It’s a lot easier to reach a wider audience when writing for a magazine than just in my own blog.

Now that the magazine has been up for a few months I see that the value to the community is much higher than I expected. The quality of the articles, the topics available, and the update frequency is spot on. I am really happy to be part of a great team of authors here.

Thank you Bjorn for taking the time to answer these questions. Do you have any final thoughts?

Yes, absolutely. If you are planning on participating in the community, do so. Take the first step, get a blog up, start writing. The SharePoint knowledge pool is growing worldwide but demand is growing even faster. Share your knowledge so everyone can benefit.

Oh, and I love my wife very much. I promised her I’d say that

If you want more information about the articles, the book or Bjorn, here’s how you will get that:
Bjorn’s articles on SharePoint Magazine
“Building the SharePoint User Experience”, book blog
Furuknap’s SharePoint Corner, Bjorn’s blog

There are a couple of reasons. Firstly I never thought of it and secondly no one asked me – at least not until fairly recently. As you probably know I was one of the MVPs who combined to write a book for Wrox (Real World SharePoint 2007) but that came about because another MVP had put the idea of such a book to Wrox and he’d then asked for volunteers to write a chapter each on something they felt happy about writing about. So I wrote the introduction!
After that I was asked a couple of times to comment on book submissions by other people so it finally got into my head that you didn’t actually have to wait to be asked but that you could think of a title and a set of chapters and then suggest such a book to a publisher. I didn’t of course.
Then I was asked a couple of times, but once it was a very general “please let us know if you have an idea for a book” and the other time it was an offer to be a co-author of a book about an aspect of SharePoint I didn’t know much about, so that didn’t seem in the end to be a particularly good idea either.
But then I was offered the Teach Yourself book and that not only was a ready-made subject area but one (WSS 3.0) I thought I knew enough about to be able to write a whole book about.

So you just started writing?

No actually my first reaction was to say that we were a bit late in the production cycle of the SharePoint v3 products so shouldn’t we put it off until v4 … but I was told (probably correctly as you may have noticed that books are now being written timed to come out up to six months after mine) that there still was a market for a good book.
So I decided that if the book is going to come out later than quite a lot of others, it had better include lots of things which weren’t available to those earlier writers. So it’s based on Service Pack 1 code; has an appendix on installing WSS 3.0 in Windows Server 2008 (moved later with the other appendices to the book’s web site); and includes things like Search Server 2008; the “Fantastic 40″ templates and various web parts and so on that weren’t available at the release of WSS 3.0.
Anyway I’m getting ahead of myself. Even if I had been invited to write the book, the first task I had was still to provide chapter titles so that they could have some hope that the book would both match the aims of the series and also be written. As the title is “in 24 Hours” that meant writing the titles of 24 chapters. I would imagine that about half of those have survived in the final book because it’s only when you are writing that you notice that you need more (usually you need more) space than one ca. 20 page chapter gives you so you need two or even three (and less often you notice that you don’t really have enough to talk about of any value to fill a full chapter so you maybe combine two into one).
After that set of chapter titles was approved, contracts were exchanged where I would hand over 6 chapters by date X; the next 6 by date Y etc. These were tough deadlines but I made them!

Tell us something about writing the book and what is in it.

Many SharePoint books are written by two or more people and I suspect that means that they are writing chapters at the same time and need to be aware of what the other person has written.
Because I was the sole author I was able to write the book entirely in the order it appears in the printed version. So it starts with an introduction chapter (completely different to the Wrox chapter I’d written a year earlier); goes on to install the product and then spends roughly a third of the book using that installation to go into basic usage and administration before closing that section of the book with a real-life example of how you would put together the bits and pieces the reader has learned so far.
I spent a lot of time thinking about which real-life solution I should pick and in the end decided that most people have at one time or another watched a TV show about a major crime investigation, so I’d use that. It means I don’t have to explain the background yet it gives the opportunity to use all kinds of lists and libraries and also have different sites and different access rights.
I’m quite happy with the result. It gives, I hope, a clear picture of the sort of things you need to think about when creating SharePoint sites for any kind of a customer or private requirement.
The next set of chapters is about the interaction of Office and WSS 3.0. There I’ve made a point of not assuming – as the Microsoft books often seem to do – that people will be using Office 2007 but also show the interaction with the equivalent Office 2003 products.
The only exception to that is Access 2007 (and not Access 2003) because I’d earlier noticed that although Microsoft expects people to use that for reports of SharePoint lists, nobody seems to have written about it much. So I have one chapter where I show how Access 2007 (and OneNote 2007 – something which also doesn’t seem to be covered elsewhere) work with WSS 3.0 but I also have a second chapter where I show how to create reports from both single WSS 3.0 lists (using a wizard) and from multi WSS 3.0 lists (NOT using a wizard!).
I have a couple of chapters on Search Server 2008 both installing and then using it on top of WSS 3.0. That includes how you can amend the standard WSS 3.0 search box so that it becomes a Search Server 2008 Advanced search box.
Then I have a couple of chapters on workflow. The first looks at the different kinds of workflows you can have in connection with the SharePoint v3 products before going on to specifically create a standard WSS 3.0 workflow and the second then looks in detail at a SharePoint Designer 2007 workflow.
I then have a couple of more SPD 2007 related chapters – one about creating DataView web parts and the next as part of a chapter on how the end-user and site (rather than system) administrator can make safety copies of his data. This includes backup/Restore information but before that mentions simpler methods such as “Save List as Template”.
Finally there are some chapters on using ready-made templates ; on using language packs and on using third-party web parts (both free and commercial).

It seems to cover a lot of ground. Is there anything you don’t write about?

There’s nothing in the book about developing own code. For that I recommend one of the many developer books out there.
This is a book about using what Microsoft provide – either in the product itself or in combination with other “free products” (Search Server 2008 Express; application templates; language packs, web parts) or with SharePoint Designer 2007 or Office 2003/2007.
The other thing you may have noticed above is that the SPD 2007 chapters don’t include a chapter on amending the look and feel of your site. I couldn’t do justification to that in a single chapter and there are any specialist books on SPD 2007 that people should read if they are planning to change the look of their site(s) so radically that they need advice on how to do it. Instead I concentrate if you like on the technical areas of SPD 2007 usage.

Your book is less than 500 pages long, how did you fit this breadth of content in it?

A: It all comes down to writing style and assumptions made about your readers. I assumed that my readers would prefer to be given introductions into the whole range of options for a WSS 3.0 installation rather than being spoon-fed a massive amount of detail on a limited range of subjects.
So, for instance, when I work through Lists and Libraries, I use in my examples only the few different field types I mostly use rather than going into details about every single field type. This means that the book retains its relevance to real life and keeps moving forward (and I hope retains the interest of its readers rather than boring them with too much detail – they can investigate the other field types by themselves later).
Another thing I try to do is to not over-complicate the examples so I don’t need to spend time explaining the aim of the example. This doesn’t mean that the examples aren’t representative of real-life needs but it does mean that for instance the Access reports I create are built using a couple of easily-understandable lists.

Is there anything you are particularly proud of in the book?

I’m actually proud of a part of a chapter that has been moved to the web site because it was regarded as being a bit beyond the scope of the book.
When you write about SPD 2007 Data View Web parts, it’s very easy to just show the sunny side and quickly knock off a web part where for instance a field is in red if sales are too low. So, while I have that show-off stuff too, when I wrote the chapter on Data View web parts I started off with a list of requirements that I thought a typical boss would demand.
As I started working through those requirements, everything went smoothly until I found that, using the user interface, it was impossible to solve one of them. Instead it would be necessary to write code.
Now what I could have done would have been to go back in the chapter and simply remove that requirement. Yet – and this is what I am proud of – despite a rapidly-approaching time-limit, I spent the next couple of days learning more than I wanted to about XSLT and XPath and finally with the help of a fellow SharePoint MVP found the exact code I needed to solve that requirement too.
So now people reading the book will first see a seemingly reasonable list of requirements; see how to solve most of them quickly and easily and yet will be aware that not everything that looks easy to solve is and that if they get a request from their boss they should build in an extra couple of days just in case.
The printed chapter in the final version satisfies most of the requirements (and ends with that warning!). The final requirement from the list of requirements is then covered in a page on the book’s web site that carries on where the written chapter leaves off.

Finally, Mike, the book title says “SharePoint 2007: Using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0″. Throughout this interview you’ve been talking about WSS 3.0. Should people using or planning to use MOSS 2007 not bother reading your book?

It IS a book about WSS 3.0 but at the same time I’ve always thought that anyone who will be using MOSS is well advised to learn about the basics by running WSS 3.0. I’ve thought that for many years so it’s nothing new that I’ve just put in to sell more copies of the book – I really do think that is the best approach. MOSS itself includes so much functionality it must be terribly difficult to learn SharePoint on a MOSS system – far better to start on WSS 3.0 and then work your way up.
So, yes, people new to the SharePoint products can certainly gain benefit from the book even if they later are involved with MOSS-based sites. As you know, virtually everything you can do in a WSS 3.0 system can be done in a MOSS system in just the same way, so there’s very little knowledge gained from reading the book that will be lost on moving to MOSS – mainly just the installation details in fact.
The other thing is that almost all the new (and possibly unique) content in the second half of the book both applies to MOSS and also might well be new to existing MOSS users. To take one example I’ve not mentioned before, the built-in Blog system is the same in both WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 and isn’t particularly good. So I’ve described in the book how to install and use the “Extended Blog Edition” which is part of the free Community SharePoint Kit.

I’ve been a part of every release of SharePoint technology since the start. Way back in the SPS 2001 (“Tahoe”) days, I was with Microsoft Consulting Services helping with field customers in the Tahoe early adopter program, and was part of the team that created architectural guidance for an optimal intranet deployment of SharePoint Portal Server 2001 and SharePoint Team Services 1.0.

I joined the SharePoint Product Management team officially in 2002, and became responsible for technical evangelism to developers and IT Pros. Over the five years that followed, I focused in on developer evangelism, interoperability issues, technical education, and a lot more. My final year at Microsoft was spend acting as a technical resource on Microsoft and competing technology to their enterprise sales teams.

I actually met the Nintex guys back in early 2002; the co-founders were still primarily in the services business, and they were attending a conference at which I was providing training. We became friends and colleagues and kept in touch. When Nintex decided to set up an American office earlier this year, they approached me and offered me more fun, more focus, and more money, and I’d still get to remain a part of the SharePoint community.

What is your role now?

I’m the Vice President of Product Technology, which essentially means I have a hand in everything from evangelism to marketing to sales to business planning to guiding short-term and long-term development and support tactics and strategies.

Tell us a bit about Nintex.

When I first met them, they were extremely clever and passionate SharePoint people, but there are several of those. Here’s the part that really impressed me…

While WSS 2.0 and SPS 2003 were great as a whole, we got a lot of grief (deservedly so) for not having a recycle bin and for not creating a new approval routing system for the then-new SQL Server store. I had, on several public occasions, told audiences how to use the eventing mechanism and a hidden document library to take care of the undelete problem, and that the eventing mechanism left room for clever workflow vendors to write something of their own. Weirdly enough, Nintex went out and built SmartLibrary, a product that did exactly those things (and a few others). Either they listened to me or we were simply in sync — either of those is a good thing.

Since then, they’ve set themselves up to build solutions FOR SharePoint technology and build them ON SharePoint technology. They’ve got short release cycles so they can adapt to new customer needs quickly, and they’re fully prepared to have to adapt/innovate/capitalize on changes that take place when Microsoft releases new versions.

Case in point: WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 provide a recycle bin and an audit trail, so Nintex decided to throw their resources into taking SmartLibrary’s simple approval up several notches to create Nintex Workflow 2007. It’s built on the same declarative workflow platform used by SharePoint Designer, but they provide a visual design environment and expose a great deal more of the feature set offered by the Windows Workflow Foundation. Plus the upgrade path is nice. They’ve thought this through.

So what is Nintex Reporting? Start with a single-sentence description, if you don’t mind.

Nintex Reporting gives you insight into the structure, content, usage, and performance of your SharePoint assets.

If I can now elaborate with more than a sentence, I’ll add that you can use it for adoption planning, usage monitoring, capacity planning, and a lot more.

There are over 75 reports in the box that cover user activity, list creation and usage, document popularity with breakdowns by file type and content type, site size, site collection size, content database saturation, and a lot more. Reports are executed on a schedule and archived. You can drill down to the individual details with one click.

Who would use it?

If you’re in charge of any corner of your SharePoint deployment, there’s something in it for you. It’s certainly optimized for IT pros operating SharePoint farms, but it’s actually quite useful to an individual site manager. The entire UI is built out of Web Parts and delivered by default as a custom site definition, but you can place key Web Parts that point to reports, scope them to a single site or collection, and embed them in any site. Would you like to see how much activity is taking place in different discussion lists? Who’s downloading which documents? How often they get updates vs. read? You can have that.

How is it different from the out-of-the-box capabilities present in SharePoint Server?

I’ll give you four good ones:

1) First off, it tells you a lot more than you’ll get in the box with MOSS or WSS.

2) Second, it’s very easy to use. You get interactive, Silverlight-based reports with drill-down, pop-over data visualization, and a lot more. You get role-based, easily customized dashboards that pull together sets of reports to suit specific user’s needs.

3) Third, the architecture is really, really nice. It takes a data warehouse-based approach. To keep the impact on your production environment low, we collect data out of your production servers and push facts into the warehouse. We execute reports against the warehouse on a schedule and cache the results. To boost response time, our UI reports from those cached results, and we only directly query the warehouse fact data when you need to do a drill-down. As a result, you get fast, fast access to, well, everything.

4) It’s extensible — very extensible. You can create your own data collectors, your own reports, your own dashboards, etc. You can even create SQL Server Analysis Services cubes against our warehouse and go nuts with your own queries using Excel Services, etc. Our SDK covers all of this.

That warehouse is what I regard as our secret sauce. We’ve released a product that provides SharePoint insight for everyone, but it’s just the first of many ways we can leverage that investment. Stay tuned!

Would you mind sharing a few screenshots?

Sure:

The collection of role-based dashboards available out of the box.

The role-based dashboard for a SharePoint implementation manager, consisting of KPI statistics, a set of graphical reports, and a set of subscription options. Embedded reports include unique users, popular sites, site activity, and document growth.

The role-based dashboard for an IT manager, consisting of KPI statistics, a set of graphical reports, and a set of subscription options. Embedded reports include file type distribution, document storage growth, content database growth, and team site sizes.

The role-based dashboard for a records manager, consisting of KPI statistics, a set of graphical reports, and a set of subscription options. Embedded reports include document type distribution, document growth, active authors, and document publication status.

The role-based dashboard for a system administrator, consisting of KPI statistics, a set of graphical reports, and a set of subscription options. Embedded reports include the most active users, document storage volume, and site creation statistics.

Report on total user activity, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on monthly growth of documents, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on list creators, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on the most active users of SharePoint Search, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on document content size per team site, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on farm-wide distribution of documents by file type, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on which users are creating the most content, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on monthly contributors to SharePoint sites across a farm, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on the most active users of a SharePoint farm, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Configuration screen for subscribing to snapshots of a report at predetermined times.

So, Joel? Tell us a bit about your background (Pre-Work)?

I’m a traveller and a family man.  I have a lovely wife and 2 awesome boys who love to hang out with dad.  We love to go camping, hiking, fishing, and just spending time outdoors.  As a family we’ve travelled across Europe, Northern Africa and even Australia.  We’re planning our next trip to Hawaii and then to Asia in the coming months.

I fell in love with computers as a kid.  MS-DOS 3.0 and a monochrome monitor playing old PC games and trading them with my friends really got me started.  My love for the Internet came in college with playing with Mosaic and this cool new Netscape beta that made surfing so much easier.  It was at that time, that business ideas, and my future really started to align with computers as I took a job dispatching computer support at the school and I’d never look back.  My first job doing programming doing HTML, Perl, Oracle DB design, on Netscape Server on Solaris  would later prepare me for Slate.com where I’d learn ASP, IIS, and SQL.  From there it was much more architecture focused with multi stage and multi tiered deployment for Intranets, Extranets, and Internet sites and hosting for XO communications.   All this would prepare me for SharePoint.”

Tell us a bit about your time at Microsoft?

“I was hired in December 2000 to take Tahoe and Office Web Server into the datacenter and make it hostable in Microsoft global production datacenters.  The operations and engineering work I’d do would set both the product and the product teams up to provide SharePoint as a service at Microsoft.  We built a very tight relationship between Microsoft IT and the SharePoint product team that would be envied by other product teams.  From Ops Analyst and Engineer I’d become the Ops Manager over the global Collaboration operations team.  We ran the operations and engineering service for the global SharePoint environments for both WSS 2.0 and SPS 2003 the largest deployments of their kind in the world.  As a result of our success and or peers in Exchange, Microsoft decided it needed to take our excellence on the road with a hosted SharePoint Service and Microsoft Managed Solutions was born.  My designs with the help of Mike Watson would grow into a dedicated SharePoint hosting platform for enterprises, the first deployment of which was Energizer.  A customer I was able to see planned architected and deployed from end to end in our 1.0 offering.  After years of sharing my experience at various Tech-Ed’s around the globe and a successful blog, I really got a bug for taking my experiences and lessons to a broader audience through technical evangelism with the SharePoint Technical Product Management team.  It was here I would fight even more for the IT experience both in the box and post launch with information on the web through various channels and sites through whitepapers, Technet content, webcasts, DVDs, and AR/PR discussions and reviews.”

What are you up to now?

“I continue to be a multi faceted SharePoint geek.  Speaker, writer, blogger, consultant, teacher, designer, and evangelist I continue to spread the SharePoint message and help out those whom I can help the most.  My blog at http://www.sharepointjoel.com is my conduit and successful SharePoint deployment and adoption for IT is my message.  I’m doing Technical Evanglism and Product Management for Nintex, teaching for the Ted Pattison Group (don’t miss SharePoint Admin Survival Summer Camp) and working on some secret tools to make the SharePoint Admin’s life easier.  If you plan to go to Tech-Ed, you could see me presenting at 5+ TechEds around the globe this year.”

Can you give us some insight into how the product is developed? From planning to production to service packs?

“The SharePoint team definitely follows what it preaches.  Development lifecycle is truly what happens.  The project managers are really responsible for working with the product planners.  Product planning begins way before the previous version ships.  In fact you can find people talking about the next 2-3 versions as they plan what will be in the next version.  A variety of roles and responsibilities make up the team.  The main core engineering team is made up of PMs, Devs, and Testers.  As well you’ll find support, release managers, product planners, product managers make up the broader team to support it through its life cycle.  After RTM and often even before many of the project managers are already working on the next version of the product and teams shift focus to supportability and scope is locked.  The thing that might surprise most people is the adds/cuts meetings.  Customers often think why didn’t they do this or that obvious feature.  Believe me, that feature was likely discussed over and over and someone fought for it and unfortunately the scope had to be locked in order to meet the goals to ship.”

Is there anything you can leak about v.Next?

“I’d like to be it isn’t my job.”

What features do you think are most powerful in the current platform and why?

“I believe the real features that hook the end users and easy to adopt are the collaboration features.  The simplicity and scalability of the base platform and site provisioning are the most powerful.”

What features do you think Microsoft left out that should have been in current iteration?

“This could get me in trouble if not explained well.”

You get to hire 3 resources for your Intranet Operations team. Describe the makeup of this team.

“Engineer, Ops, and someone more customer facing like a service manager or ops manager.”

Describe which skills make up the perfect SharePoint consultant?

“Look at my SharePoint Architect blog post for a verbose answer.I say experience with multi tiered web applications with expertise in troubleshooting HTTP/Web Infrastructure and backend SQL Database storage.”

If you were to interview this consultant, and you only had 3 questions to ask, what would they be?

“ 1) What would you do if you get a generic error on an ASP.NET page?
2) How would you troubleshoot a can’t connect to database error?
3) A customer asks you to change a stored procedure to optimize a query what would you do?”

Thanks for chatting to us Joel.

You can catch Joel on his blog at: SharePoint Joel