Folks,
I've been blessed to be part of this white hot technology called SharePoint for the last 5 years. It all started in late 2003 early 2004 when a SharePoint MVP named Darrin Bishop took me under his wing and began to show me how SharePoint would one day RULE THE WORLD of corportate intranets and collaboration portals. He was dead right. I really enjoyed the platform. There was a lot more sizzle to it than the Biztalk work I had been doing and I wanted to be more than just another .NET developer.
Turns out that Darrin was writing a book called The Rational Guide to Building SharePoint Web Parts and I was unknowingly the guinee pig for some of the concepts that he would later publish. Anyway, Darrin helped provide me with a good SharePoint foundation, back when there weren't many people doing SharePoint. From there, I executed several engagements on my own on the WSS V2 platform.
Eventually, I was led to make a change. A long term engagement (over 6 months) with a client that involved a daily 2.5 hour 1 way commute got to be a bit much and there was no end in sight. So I poked my head out onto Monster.com and found this company called KnowledgeLake who figured out that the SharePoint platform makes for a real nice "out of the box" storage repository for Document Management systems. They needed Professional Services consultants with SharePoint experience. Not only did I have experience architecting solutions, but I could also code against the object model. I sent my resume to them and they called me within 45 minutes! A great relationship was born.
Well, fast forward to 2009. I know have 5 years of SharePoint architecture experience and I've passed all 4 SharePoint MCTS tests. Low and behold, I've met the pre-requisites for the Microsoft Certified Master training program! But, holy cow this is some expensive training! Who could expect their employer to just randomly spring for an $18,000+ training program with no guarantee of success? I didn't think they would go for it but KL never ceases to surprise me. One of the VPs of the company heard about the Master program through the MS Partner Advisory Council. He actually contacted ME!
So I applied and was accepted into the program! I am very flattered, honored, excited, and scared to death all at the same time right now. I have 6 weeks to brush up on the areas of SharePoint that I have less experience in. My career has been focused around large scale architecture and deployment, search, taxonomy design, and general IT infrastructure planning. So I'll be spending the next 6 weeks broadening my skills with branding/theming, web content management, BDC, Forms Server, and Report Server/BI integration.
I've already poured through all of the background info I can find on the net. Including the blog entries on the topic from Todd Baginski, Spencer Harbar, and Andrew Connell. So based on what I've read so far, I'm pretty sure this is going to be the hardest thing I've ever done!
I will blog more about the program but only to the extent that I'm allowed. I haven't figured out yet what "allowed" is yet, so there won't be much right away.
Hopefully though, I'll be sitting down, back in my office, on April 5th, blogging about the experience in general. Pass or fail. I plan to write it down here. Oh yeah. I don't plan on failing.
Anyway, this concludes the narritive on my SharePoint career! As I move through new study material, I'm sure I'll have some additional interesting technical comments.
Cheers.
Russ Houberg