Mission Complete: I’m ready for the next step!

Friday is my last day running the SharePoint team for what I’ve been calling my 2 year mission with the LDS church. It’s been a great opportunity to give back. I’ve been lucky to have been able to serve with an incredible SharePoint Team as the Solutions Manager… (Equivalent to Director in most organizations.) Our solution team is made up of design, development, Q&A, engineering, operations, project, and product management for the solution. Recently the ops and engineering resources were moved under and ops manager, but we continued to manage the resources through a scrum model for both the dev team and the ops and engineering team. This past week we’ve been preparing for the final push to upgrade to SharePoint 2013. We’ve got some great plans to rollout search, incorporate some responsive designs with support for a wide variety of mobile devices, and we’ve finished segregating the data from the most sensitive and secure data to encrypted databases accomplishing the final step in our goals of compliance and data governance.

 

 

We’ve been through some amazing times together, highlights include:

• Building the best SharePoint team in the world. I bet the team has a combined experience of over 40 years of SharePoint experience
• Acquiring Yammer and teaching the enterprise about social networking achieving 400% growth and 30% enterprise adoption organically
• 100% of farms upgraded to SharePoint 2010 including 2000 + sites and all custom apps and forms
• SharePoint 2010 Extranet rollout with integration with claims & external authentication with Oracle SSO and E-Directory
• SharePoint 2010 anonymous sites
• Rollout of awesome enterprise styles with a cool UI to easily switch between multiple colors and layouts
• Rollout of an enterprise wide feature bar providing
• Enterprise rich predictive search and type ahead for people, catalog, and enterprise best bets
• Enterprise Service and Product Catalog
• SharePoint 2013 Beta Project (can’t talk too much about this)
• 100% compliance with Site Classifications including eliminating unused, unclaimed and unclassified sites
• SQL 2012 database encryption
• SQL 2012 BI integration with Reporting Services, PowerPivot, etc…
• Mobile SharePoint Project with responsive design prototyping
• SharePoint as an Application Platform Governance and
• SharePoint Search as an Enterprise and trusted Service
• Plans to Rollout SharePoint 2013 Search with custom display templates and UI (Test environment & Prototype is ready to roll) Rollout should happen in the next 30 days.
• Enhanced Profiles with PeopleSoft integration
• Enterprise Single Sign On (still a few thing to work out, but the planned rollout of the F5 module will likely nail this)
• Eliminated the Fab 40!! IT and Dev teams trained ready to roll for 2013 upgrade… content scheduled for end of Q1 2013
• Healthy SharePoint User Group and Community participation both in Yammer, and offline through field participation in weekly training calls and monthly gatherings and yearly conferences

I hope to follow up with blog with a couple of recent examples of these projects where we knocked it out of the park.

Over the next week I’ll be looking at my options and praying about what’s next for me and my family. I have been very blessed with some incredible experiences in my life and I do count this last job a real blessing for me and my family. What’s next? I guess we’ll see how it plays out!

I know I don’t want to settle. I’ve got kids that will be going to college in the next few years, so making sure I can provide for the best education is important. I want to do something with big impact. When I first started thinking about what I’d want to do next I was thinking NASA, White House, UN, various federal branches… NSA, CIA, FBI, and branches like that. I do have a dream to be an Ambassador, so if Obama is reading this. I think I need to schedule a visit to the Fed spug! I am open…

I’ve also considered going into the consulting world. I’ve really enjoyed doing vision and strategy on enterprise projects. So, maybe a partner in a consulting group either looking to expand or grow their SharePoint practice. With the right funding I’d consider building a consulting company from the ground up.

I have also been thinking about Marketing and Social Media roles. In all cases, I do need flexibility for speaking and community building at least once a quarter, and ample vacation time with a cool boss.

At this point, I’m entertaining calls and ideas. My last day is Friday, so I’m setting up a variety of appointments. I’ll update this post when I update my resume. I do plan to continue to work with SharePoint.