Building up the Sri Lankan SharePoint community

Calling out to all SharePoint developers and enthusiasts in Sri Lanka, the Colombo Code Camp Community organised the Colombo SharePoint Camp held earlier this week featuring world-renowned SharePoint guru Bjørn Furuknap who shared his vast experience and knowledge with the small yet flourishing community here in Sri Lanka.

 Furuknap has been a Senior Solution Architect and SharePoint Developer for the last 16 years, offering technology consulting for the top league players in the global industry including Microsoft, EDB, Norwegian Military, Telenor, Ergo Group, DnB and more.

Catching up with the SharePoint whiz at the end of a productive workshop, he explained some of the finer points behind the web application platform, spoke of his own accomplishments within the industry and shared his thoughts on the Sri Lankan SharePoint community. Following are excerpts from the interview:

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

Q: In a nutshell, what is SharePoint all about?

A: Essentially SharePoint is a platform on which organisations and companies build applications that they use in their work. It is an incredibly flexible platform and scalable which means that it is applicable and useable for small companies and even small teams within large organisations up to massively complex enterprise scenarios in which you can deploy solutions that span continents and multiple data centres. So the flexibility, power and scalability of SharePoint means that it is a really useful platform for organisations when they want to build solutions to solve problems.

Q: Could you give me an example of an organisation that uses SharePoint as a solution provider?

A: One example is the solution that we built for ABB. Their situation basically was that they needed a project management solution and they also needed a better way of displaying the skills and profiles of people in their organisation. One of the components that we built there was a much improved profile service that allowed the entire organisation to better service the skills available both in smaller teams and throughout the organisation enabling project leaders and project managers who need a specific set of skill sets to find them and see what people were available to work on those projects.

That’s one example. Project management is something people do all the time; they build custom solutions in order to solve their specific needs on projects because projects and the operations of projects in organisations is one of the things that make organisations unique. There are a lot of best practices on how organisations should handle projects and organisations have their own preferences on how they should do that. It is essentially very easy using SharePoint to support their unique method of running their projects.

Q: Could you tell me about your own involvement in SharePoint and the work you have undertaken?

A: I am fairly involved on a personal level, in the community and professionally. It’s a passion of mine. My main money-generating activity is my work as a consultant. I help organisations understand how best to utilise SharePoint and to some extent, I also develop solutions that they require. In addition to that I run a SharePoint university in the US. It’s an online university so we have a series of courses and training material and people who join the academy learn from that. Part of that university is a publishing arm which runs a major SharePoint site called SharePoint Magazine and publishes all the books I’ve written – I’ve written 19 books on SharePoint so far.

Beyond that I’m also trying to be involved in community events much like the one we just had in Sri Lanka which is essentially something that is quite unique in the SharePoint world because our communities are extremely strong and people love sharing – sort of part of the name. People go around to different events, talk about their experiences, both people who are so-called experts and those who are just starting out. They share their experiences and exchange ideas across all skill levels and across all disciplines and everyone gains something from it, so I try to do that as much as possible which is why I think that these events like the one we had here are absolutely brilliant way for people to meet and learn about SharePoint.

Q: How will SharePoint and the organisation of such events further the IT industry in Sri Lanka?

A: SharePoint’s flexibility means that its impact is incredibly wide. It sounds like a dream scenario – SharePoint is applicable to virtually any organisation and can solve such a wide range of problems and situations for organisations. This means that with the growth of SharePoint, there is going to be a need for SharePoint professionals - people who are skilled and trained in best practices and in how to build these solutions for years and decades to come.

It is one of the core products for Microsoft and they are putting in massive amounts of effort into making SharePoint the main enterprise platform for building any kind of application. The need for professionals is so high that when we have events like this, we will essentially not just increase the skill level people of the people that are here but they too will also be able to create new solutions for the organisations they are working for and their clients, broadening the adoption of SharePoint and again furthering the need for even more skilled professionals.

It is more or less a self-evolving prophecy because if you start using SharePoint, it is almost like an addiction because you can immediately see how useful it can be. It can solve immediate problems whether they are small processes that someone in a department will need to better track something that happens and that leads to adoption which means that organisations will want to use SharePoint for larger projects

Q:What are your thoughts on the SharePoint community in Sri Lanka?

A: I think Sri Lanka is one of the most exciting communities I have been in, first of all because the interest around SharePoint here is wonderful. One of my key ideas, which I also presented to Microsoft when I met their CIOs earlier this week, was that organisations should harness their uniqueness to become stronger and I think that looking at the SharePoint community in Sri Lanka as an organisation, it has a lot of uniqueness that can be turned into strengths.

For instance, the people I have spoken to today are extremely skilled; they are intelligent and understand concepts very quickly and obviously there is a cost factor because the Sri Lankan workforce is a lot cheaper than European labour. Considering the demand for SharePoint skills around the world now, it is incredibly difficult to get affordable SharePoint professionals. With events like these, coupled with continued support and further work with the community, I think the Sri Lankan SharePoint community has a brilliant future and will definitely be useful for a long time to come.

Q: How successful would you say the workshop has been here?

A: Overall, the participants seemed to be grasping the concepts well and the concepts that we taught here were fairly advanced so the fact that they were able to follow and understand them is a credit to the community. The event itself has been extremely well organised and the right people had been picked to participate. From my perspective, it has been several weeks of preparation and I had a great time myself and I think the participants also learned a lot, so I think it was a great success.

Q: Is there anything else you are working on while you are in Sri Lanka – have you met with other organisations for instance?

A: Yes. On the first day I was at 99X Technology where we had several sessions with their developers basically focused on understanding the vast variety of development roles in SharePoint. As it is a vast product, people need to know what they are doing and the skills sets that they require for the various roles that they hold. I was also at Microsoft talking to several CIOs and I delivered a presentation on how organisations could harness their unique aspects to become stronger, to take what they already do and do it better utilising SharePoint and I showcased how SharePoint can be used to harness those unique aspects and the abilities of the employees.

Q: What would you say is the way forward from here for the Sri Lankan SharePoint community?

A: To move forward I think the community needs to keep having events like this. There are some brilliant people here already, ones who are extremely skilled and I think the community itself needs to start fronting those people, making them more visible, utilising them. You don’t need to invite people from Europe and the United States or from anywhere else because you have a lot of skill here already and people need to start exchanging information.

If you look at a country like the US where the SharePoint community is extremely strong, they have an event called SharePoint Saturday which is essentially a completely community-based event where higher profile people in the community talk, share their experiences and organise workshops.

 The community needs to adopt something similar here in Sri Lanka and it’s always a win-win situation for everyone because what someone learns from one project, they can immediately bring to others and everyone could actually learn from that. The demand for people and knowledge is so strong, it is essentially not a competitive market either; people are much more interested in sharing what they learn and learning from others than they are in protecting what they know.