Paul Culmsee
www.sevensigma.com.au

Often as a SharePoint consultant, you are faced with the situation where you can see plainly that a client who is new to SharePoint, is a high risk of condemning their organisation to a path that will end in tears. There are countless ways that this can happen, but the common thread amongst them all is that the client is usually making a decision from the perspective of unconscious incompetence – training speak for “you don’t know what you don’t know”. This can be a socially complex situation sometimes, because to tell a client that they are not ready, or not yet informed enough to make a particular call, has to be handled with care and some clients do not like their judgement called into question.

When you write blogs and have any sort of online profile, you tend to attract like-minded people who agree with what you have to say – in other words, you preach to the converted. You are not really changing anybody’s mind, but rather reaffirming what they already believe anyway.

But if you go into any organisation with the usual stresses, such as chaos, politics and deadlines, it is more than likely that the people you are consulting to do not know who you are, and really couldn’t care less either. While I’d love it if all of my clients read my blog, I have to rely on other ways of getting my messages across.

I have a way of dealing with this that seems to do the trick and so thought that others might want to try this out for themselves. My method is to channel the ghosts of failed projects past and become a SharePoint medium.

SharePoint medium? Yup, just like those TV guys, like John Edwards, who rake in the dollars giving “closure”. Put me in front of a large SharePoint audience and I could wow them all.

• Me: “I am getting a J or M … is there anybody here has a colleague or friend with a J or M in their name?”
• Audience: Several dozen hands raised
• Me: “J seems to be quite concerned with hair care – perhaps a web designer or web developer?”
• Audience: Gasps of amazement and general murmur of excitement
• Me: “I sense great frustration from J, it seems J dislikes SharePoint default branding deeply…”
• Audience: “How does he do it? It’s like he knows me!”

• Me: “I am getting something about QL? SL?
• Audience member: “SQL?”
• Me: Yes! A huge content database – massive. Larger than 100, 150 gigabytes?”
• Audience member: “157gig?”
• Me: “Yes! And it just kind of crept up on you right?”
• Audience member: Yes (sobs)… yes!
• Me: “And the guy who set it up left the company and never documented it?”
• Audience member: Now weeping and nodding
• Me: (holding audience member by the hand and speaking softly) “You had no prior warning did you. The SQL box simply ran out of space and transaction logs filled the disk”
• Audience Member: Hugs me sobbing out loud
• Me: “The DBA would like you to know that he’s sorry and it was not your fault. He forgot to check the maintenance plan.”
• Audience Member: “Thank you so much! You have no idea what this means to me!”

Psychics are real – my case study

Now, I know that there are sceptics, and people will claim that being able to channel the spirits is just an elaborate trick. To you I offer the following case study, where I put my psychic skills to good use most recently when working with a young, keen web designer who had no specific SharePoint branding expertise. I needed to get this designer to a certain level of competence, where they had an appreciation of the broader implications of their design decisions.

Like the above examples, I suggested that I had amazing psychic powers and could predict their future. I told them that within 1-4 weeks from now, they would feel an incredibly strong, practically irrepressible urge to rip out the navigation and completely replace it with a custom solution. They would get frustrated with branding certain pages and would have a strong desire to modify files in the 12 hive as well.

I told this designer that I was calling this out now so that they would not be surprised when I told them in 1-4 weeks that we were not going to do any of these things. Instead, I promised that if, after 6-8 weeks or so, they still feel that irrepressible urge, then we will work through it.

By calling it up-front, I planted a little expectation seed and sure enough, the developer got frustrated at not only the navigation, but inline styles of certain web parts, relentless use of tables instead of divs, as well as good old application.master. I reminded him of our earlier conversation. “Yeah, yeah. I remember” was the answer. To his credit, this developer did a brilliant CSS/Master page job and was able to make this intranet site look really good without the sort of hacks that seasoned SharePoint consultants know is a bad idea.

During this time, the developer had come to grips with the publishing pages and layouts, implications of unghosting, delegatecontrol, and the ways that ASP.NET controls could be leveraged. By this time he also understood the notion of navigation providers which meant that I was able to begin a serious dialogue on how to leverage available tools to get them over the line (such as the alternative rendering framework, the AKS and the whole notion of the HTTP module).

To cut a long story short, with some assistance from one of my colleagues, this branding effort was packaged up to a WSP and tested via restoring the site to another SharePoint box, via both the content DB attach and “STSADM –o restore” methods.

It all worked so flawlessly I wiped a little consultant tear from my eye and swallowed the lump in my throat.

My newbie SharePoint designer had all grown up!

I was so proud.

Thanks for reading.

Paul Culmsee www.sevensigma.com.au

p.s. For private psychic readings, please contact me via www.cleverworkarounds.com :-)