Editor's note: As has become our annual tradition, before we bid adieu to 2012, we'd like to take a few moments to reflect on some significant events from the past "Year in Bamboo" ... and to offer a glimpse into what the future may hold for our customers. We get the series underway with the perspectives our three product managers, with each of them offering considered thoughts on the products they oversee, and we'll wrap up with the view from Bamboo's Solutions Center.
As the Director of Bamboo's Solutions Center, you've been working closely with Rob Manfredi and his Enterprise teamover the past year. What does your role entail when you're working in conjunction with the Enterprise team?
I work closely with Rob and his team to demonstrate the breadth of tools available in our product portfolio, and how they can help address a variety of business challenges. We often talk to large organizations that have centralized the management/maintenance of their SharePoint environments and have built a central, organization-wide SharePoint practice. These internal teams are very busy addressing many requests from across their organizations, and find that a versatile, flexible toolset like ours helps them address these requests efficiently, effectively, and with minimal custom coding.
Between your primary role leading the Solutions Center, your work with the Enterprise team, and attending and speaking at conferences, your travel has increased over the past year, hasn't it? What do you most enjoy about traveling for customer engagements, Enterprise consultations, and SharePoint conferences?
I really enjoy meeting our customers (and potential customers) in person and learning about the challenges they face getting their work done. This diverse experience really helps me relate to many different types of situations, and then come back to Bamboo and communicate real-world challenges to our team so that we can continue to build better and better solutions.
Has the Solutions Center engaged in any Design and Configuration Services business this past year that you're free to discuss?
We've completed many PM Central (PMC) Design and Configuration Services this year. We make these services available to help our PMC customers get up and running quickly by recommending configurations tailored to the way they manage projects. PMC is a great application with many flexible built-in options. During a Design and Configuration services engagement, our PMC experts spend time with customers to learn about the particular PM methodology in use at their organization, and the associated challenges and needs. Then, through a series of Web meetings, we develop a detailed plan to configure PMC specifically for that organization. The intent is not to implement the solution for them, but rather to teach, recommend, and explain so they can configure it themselves, both initially as well as down the road. We know that in today's dynamic business environment, it's sometimes better to equip a team with the skills to handle their anticipated adjustments over time, and to do so internally.
We also get involved helping customers migrate data into SharePoint and PM Central from legacy systems. Solutions for these engagements often involve a combination of our List Bulk Import and Workflow Conductor products.
Finally, we've completed a number of additional service engagements to help design and configure business solutions that include some of our other popular products such as List Rollup, Alert Plus, Data-Viewer, Knowledge Base Solution Accelerator, List Rotator, Chart Plus, and Workflow Conductor.
You were a member of the team attending SPC 2012 this year, helping to staff the Bamboo booth, answering customer questions, attending (and blogging) sessions, and even returning to the SPC stage as a speaker. What did you take away from each of those activities?
In the sessions I attended at SPC I learned a lot about SharePoint 2013 and what's coming down the pike from Microsoft and it's very exciting. Although I certainly understand why, I was a little bit disappointed that there wasn't more on SharePoint 2010. As a solutions person, my day-to-day life revolves around issues that come from what customers are using today - not what they plan to use in the future. We don't yet have customers using SharePoint 2013 in production, and many are still running MOSS. The challenges our customers are facing will need to be solved on the older platforms for now.
But regardless of the SharePoint version you're using, we still believe in and talk a lot about buying versus building, and that was the subject our presentation this year in the Partner Theater. We always teach the benefits of buying flexible, reusable components for use in solution development so you can minimize the use of custom code. Many people who use custom code don't realize the hidden costs until they try to migrate or modify that custom solution. Flexible, reusable components like the ones in our portfolio allow organizations to deploy real solutions faster, maintain them more easily, and minimize the need for end user training.
You presented that Build vs. Buy session at several SharePoint events this year. How is the talk generally received? Is there a particular question-or set of questions-that tends to come up in the Q&A?
I tend to see lots of heads in the audience nodding in agreement during the Build vs. Buy talk. I believe that's due to the ongoing evolution of SharePoint over the years. Organizations that have experienced a migration from one version to the next are the ones who are nodding their heads most frequently. They know the real cost of custom solutions, solutions that seemed so great when they were initially deployed. When they can no longer find the vendor or developer who did the initial work, however, they suddenly realize that there are a lot of hidden costs in that custom code. It really pays to use out-of-the-box as often as possible, supplementing as necessary with off-the-shelf third party tools, and minimizing the need for custom code in the process.
I think heads also nod because of a paradigm shift I see in the centralization of SharePoint expertise in large organizations. This shift means that organizations are looking for tools that are versatile and can address more than one need. I think a custom solution for a very specific business need in a single department is a thing of the past. Organizations need to leverage their investments and now they try to build versatile solutions that can then be used by more than one department.
The Q&A at the end of the Build vs. Buy talk talks tends to be about solution frameworks and how they can be leveraged to deploy solutions or prototypes quickly.
I imagine that in addition to answering lots of questions at the booth at SPC, you also delivered more than a few product demos. Which products were the most popular in terms of demo requests?
I did do a lot of demonstrations at our booth this year - even more than in years past, I think. The most popular ones were the ones that showed our PM Central application and how it helps organizations manage projects in a portfolio. Managing projects is a need most organizations I've worked with have, and they're always looking for ways to be more efficient. I also did a lot of demonstrations of our Knowledge Management solution and of Workflow Conductor.
Having spent a fair amount of time with SharePoint 2013 at this point (I'm guessing), are there any observations you've made, or notable opportunities represented by the new platform-for Bamboo in general, or for the Solutions Center or Enterprise team in particular-that you'd care to share?
As I mentioned, most of the customers that I deal with everyday are still using SharePoint 2010 and many are still on MOSS. As a result, I actually haven't spent too much time with SharePoint 2013 personally. Our team is very busy finishing the port of our products to SharePoint 2013 to coincide with the official release though, and I look forward to learning more about the new platform as we begin to see it deployed in our customers' organizations.