Author: Amy Smith, Senior Project Manager, Perficient
Dynamic! That is how I would describe Dan Holme, MVP. Dan’s presentation at SharePoint Fest Chicago 2012 was, “Preparing for SharePoint 2013”. Dan travels the world doing SharePoint projects, and his most recent was the Summer Olympics in London.
During his presentation, Dan went through all of the changes in SharePoint 2013 and why Microsoft included them–something we had heard from other speakers too. Then he detailed the preparations IT professionals need to make to ensure their environments and organizations are ready for SharePoint 2013. See Dan’s presentation here for the details.
My takeaways were that while business drivers should make the case for moving to SharePoint 2013, there are plenty of technical components with respect to infrastructure, networks, storage, DNS, SSL, Services, IE, browsers, information management . . . you know, things that get technical folks excited, to keep IT very busy. This means that organizations need to work with professionals who know the ins and outs and can guide them to the promised land of improved business performance for their organizations. He also gave some best practice tips to IT pros to get ready for SharePoint 2013:
- Get a good PM in place to shepherd the process along
- Have an inventory of your current state
- Retrain and refocus your developers on 2013
- Update your information management policies
- Define your roles and responsibilities
- Improve any bad policies you have now that you have been meaning to fix such as wide lists, huge queues, poor indexing, and out-of-control security settings
The final message from Dan is that the intranet is dead. However, personalization, search, MySites–these are alive and well in SharePoint 2013. So, prepare your IT organization to get ready for what your organization is going to demand to solve their business issues and grow.