Just sat the 70-630 exam – “Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring” with absolutely no study. Yesterday morning (Thursday 28/2) one of my integration partners asked me to sit the exam for their certified partner requirements. I looked online and the only exam in Perth was today (29/2).

Was it hard? No, not really, but I’ll have worked non stop on MOSS07 since May 06 and fortunately, writing these long-winded blog articles has come in handy as I scored 911 which I was well pleased with. So, I’m thinking I should go and sit the WSS version (70-631) this coming Tuesday 🙂

Anyhow, what a crappy certification name. “Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring”, how’s that supposed to squeeze onto the business card?  MCTS-SS07C? Sheesh!

Am I any more cooler now?  I seriously doubt it 🙂

Paul

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had a running joke with my darling wife that one day she will be so successful that she will be able to ‘keep’ me. I’d not have to work and instead, spend my days doing whatever kept men do to stay kept. I’m not actually sure what they do, but I’m sure it involves a jet ski! At the very least, being a kept man *surely* means you get to have breakfast in bed every morning and a foot rub? I could get used to that!

*ducks for cover*

Anyway, my darling wife said to me one day “So what is this SharePoint thing you have been going on about lately?”. She’s been in her chosen profession (light years away from IT) for all of her working life and looking for a change of scene. Although computer literate, the closest thing we have ever come to ‘talking shop’, is when she used to test me when I was studying for a certification by reading sample exam questions.

So I showed her the collaborative side of SharePoint. We created a few lists with custom columns, version control, infopath and SPD workflows. She liked what she saw and said something along the lines of “oh we could sure use this at work”.

I’d just upgraded my notebook to a new model, but somehow she got the upgraded one and I was stuck with the old crappy one. Not quite sure how that happened, but hey, I’m on a quest to become kept here, if it costs me the fancier notebook, then so be it!

So I put a SharePoint VM on her notebook, and we played out some scenarios.

Fast forward a few days. She has:

• created a variety of related lists to hold various nuggets of information
• created document libraries, that looks up the aforementioned lists
• created and published various forms via infopath with lookups to the above lists 
• created all of the views required for the above
• created web part pages containing dashboards of connected lists/libraries
• coded several SPD workflows to reduce the amount of data entry required and automatically fill information to lists

and as an added bonus:

• Demonstrated her work to all her colleagues and friends (and her way of explaining the product is much better than mine)
• Doesn’t mind me “talking shop” once in a while and participates in people/process conversations
• I take her notebook to demonstrations and use her work for the demo as it is better than mine! (particularly her infopath skills)

Sensing the opportunity for moving a step forward in my quest to become kept, I said to her, “you know, you are now very, very employable”, but alas, she dismissed the suggestion, believing that everyone out there in corporate land knows this stuff. Therefore (for now), she is still in her part-time job.

Damn!  Round 1 lost, but I’m not done yet! The quest to become kept will go on!

At least there is one consolation to this little story. When I am doing pre-sales work I can say “it’s so easy my wife does it, and she’s not in IT at all”, and I’m telling the god honest truth! I’ve had a couple of clients say to me, “does she want a job”?, but she doesn’t believe it! 🙂

So If you, like me, share the dream to become a kept man, go and show your wife SharePoint! You never know your luck…

(start the working week with a laugh)

I was writing a post and adding my usual dose of sarcasm and piss taking of IT department stereotypes. As I wrote it, the piss taking became larger than the topic itself (which was about the risks of IT departments trying to sell SharePoint to the rest of the business). So I’ve now largely abandoned my original topic and am just writing this post for the fun of it.

Any child of the 70’s and 80’s will have read the “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories, where you are presented with a choice and according to the decision made you then turn to the directed page.

Here I present the world’s first SharePoint Choose Your Own Adventure story. The premise of this story is that our trusty IT department has been bitten by the SharePoint bug and thinks it would be great for the organisation. The book is entitled:

“I.T Knows Best (Resistance is Futile)”

(ya like my 3L1T3 PH070SH0P SK1LLZ ? 🙂

Continue reading “Selling MOSS – A Choose Your Own Adventure Story”