SharePoint Project for a newbie

This article comes out directly for people who are new to SharePoint. Being immersed in SharePoint world most of the time I assume that people have atleast basic idea on implementation of SharePoint Projects, but again one of the attendee in my session at SharePoint Saturday Michigan brought this up today - How do we go about implementing SharePoint, I do not have any knowledge on implementation or for maintenance - do we go to Microsoft everytime we have an issue?


This post will hope fully help people who are new to Microsoft world and new to SharePoint and are interested in implementing SharePoint.

First SharePoint Project -

You know SharePoint is great and you have great ideas and use cases, great! Next step would be to do proof of concept or further analysis of your ideas. To make this happen you can reach out to SharePoint Consulting Firms or local Microsoft Representative who will then direct you to one of the Microsoft Partners.

This is necessary unless you have SharePoint Subject Matter Expert on board with you to make this happen.

Key things you need to look for hiring SharePoint Consulting firms:

1. Their experience in similar project that you are planning for

2. Along with processes, people makes great difference in overall success of the project.

Also with SharePoint 2010 and lot of available thirdy party products, code plex projects - implementation time and cost can be reduced to a great extent compared to few years back.

This site will help for third party products: http://www.sharepointreviews.com/

You need to know about CodePlex, it has great components available at no cost: http://www.codeplex.com/

If you want to keep track of upcoming SharePoint Events, this site helps: http://www.mssharepointevents.com/

SharePoint Engine also helps with initial assessment and providing approach and estimation at no cost! At request we can also setup a SharePoint Site for you to play around.

Thanks,
Parth
parth@sharepointengine.com