We are finally ready to launch our Governance, Risk, and Compliance solutions!

We've partnered with AvePoint and are showcasing their Compliance Guardian product. With our QuickStart SharePoint Compliance solution you'll get both the professional expertise around SharePoint and compliance, and also the software from AvePoint. If you haven't looked at Compliance Guardian, it's a powerful rule-based software that allows us to detect, decide, and act on SharePoint content that isn't correctly tagged and secured. We can quarantine, move, delete, and more automatically.

We start these engagements with a unique discovery method that will assess and compare your current state with your compliance and governance strategy. At the heart of this engagement we'll help you identify and measure the risk within your SharePoint environment. I think a lot of people make risk management too complicated - few clients are actually under GLBA, FDA, etc compliance.

During my tenure with NASA, I had the privilege of working with some of the nation's greatest minds and working with a broad spectrum of information including business data, propulsion engineering designs, and flight and telemetry data. My role eventually evolved into systems engineering and data architecture for manned space flight programs and managing complex datasets across multiple NASA projects and vendors.

Information handling requirements for these datasets were unique from project to project and vendor to vendor. Program and business analysts were concerned with reporting clear and accurate financials, manpower levels, and scheduling. Project engineers were concerned about defining clear system requirements and designing hardware to meet those requirements. Quality engineers and test engineers were responsible for developing testing methods and carrying out those tests on hardware and software components.

Definitely one of my highlights from 2012 was presenting a session at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Vegas with my cohort Eric Harlan. In our session we built a Windows 8 application using HTML and CSOM to retrieve and post information for SharePoint 2013’s Social features.

We got a lot of great feedback on the session and actually scored fairly well tell too. I think what resonated with the audience is that we built the application step-by-step and even allowed the application to throw many of the errors I ran into when writing the application. I wanted to bring some “real world” to the demos and help people overcome these common errors when they were writing their own applications. I’ve been meaning to blog about this as well but have been so busy / burned out that I just have not gotten around to it.  Well… thanks to insomnia, I’m finally getting around to it.

Okay.. okay.. enough rambling back story… Let’s step through the process of building your first JavaScript Windows 8 application that uses SharePoint 2013’s CSOM (Client Side Object Model).

Summit 7 was founded on the principle that doing things right makes it easy to do the right thing. This begins with an honest appraisal of a client's situation and commitment to solve a problem or enable opportunity for them. Will we implement systems based on requirements we didn't gather? No.

At a minimum, we'll have a phase that reviews the clients' requirements for stakeholder and change leadership validation. Many times change leaders are overlooked in requirements gathering. See, at Summit 7 our discovery is our "magic sauce" and part of this is a proprietary method for identifying change leaders. We know how to ask non-technical questions to business folks and get very good technical requirements. This isn't easy and requires a mentorship process that happens with every consultant that on boards to Summit 7. Let me give you a real world example of how Summit 7 is different:

According to TripIt I traveled over 120 days last year. That may sound like a lot, but the bright side is that when I’m not traveling, I’m likely sitting at home in my pj’s with a big cup of coffee. So, 120+ days of travel really doesn’t bother me at all. However, that means that around 240 days a year I’m at home, and when I’m working, it’s just me in my office sitting in front of my computer. This allows me to get a LOT more work done than going into the office every morning, fighting traffic on the way to work, getting interrupted by office talk and people stopping by, and fighting traffic on the way home. However, this somewhat disconnected state of work existence makes one skill completely critical to every aspect of what I do… Communication… (I’m guessing the title of the blog gave that away). So, any hiccup in communication can have an amplified affect.

Woohoo!! I'll be back teaching classes in 2013 along with other Summit 7 Systems consultants, like Jay Simcox and Jim Curry. This offers students some of the best training options available for SharePoint Server 2013. You'll get to learn from instructors who do this for a living and see hundreds of solutions and problems with the product. The first class I'm teaching is in Huntsville, Feb 20-22. This will be a 2013 Administrator's class for those upgrading from 2010. It will be a deep dive, so bring some Red Bull and protein bars :-)  (I guess we could order in pizza...we'll see)