SharePoint Magazine editor, Arno Nel caught up with one of the blogosphere’s most well know bloggers, Joel Oleson.

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