Swedes Singing Star Wars

We’re here at the Swedish SharePoint/Exchange Forum, and it’s cocktail reception time, and they’ve got an a Capella quintet here for entertainment (they used to be a barbershop quartet but they added a guy and updated their repertoire to get chicks).

They’re singing — I kid you not — the jazz tune from the bar in Tatooine in Star Wars. And they’re lamenting that they still don’t get chicks.

This is weird. So I’m happy.

Farewell, Patrick

In case you haven’t heard elsewhere, Patrick Tisseghem passed away this past Wednesday.  He was teaching a class in Gothenburg, Sweden, had a heart attack, and died shortly thereafter at hospital.

I’m here in Stockholm right now because I’m speaking at the SharePoint/Exchange Forum this Monday and Tuesday.  But I flew in two days early, and Patrick was planning to stay in Sweden a few extra days so we could hang out here this weekend.  Stockholm is a gorgeous place, but to me it’s going to have a melancholy glow attached to it for some time.

We went to Antarctica together this past December (it meant having set foot on all seven continents for both of us). We were making plans to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. The first time I ever visited Belgium, he spirited me away to the beach with his family. He wasn’t just a professional friend, or a conference friend, he was a bona fide carry-secrets-about-each-other-to-the-grave friend.

It’s really funny that things turned out that way because the first time we met, it was over an exchange of blog posts, which started a short period of antagonism borne of misunderstanding.  We cleared that up pretty quickly, though, and became professional friends in short order.

But that’s what he meant to me.  Here’s what he means to you (at the very least), whether you know it or not:

• Patrick fought the good fight in terms of development with SharePoint long before SharePoint was cool. Heck, long before it was even legitimately possible.  He’s one of the original pantheon of SharePoint heroes. If not for his efforts (and the other short list of solution builders), I’m not sure where we’d be today in terms of SharePoint having taken off.  I mean, I, and a few others, asked you to develop on SharePoint technology — he (and a few others) went out and did it.  His work influenced countless others. He helped make the initial snowball that picked up mass and started the avalanche.
• He started blogging about SharePoint technology long before the rest of us, certainly long before any of us at Microsoft.
• Patrick, along with Jan Tielens and other people at U2U were instrumental in making Web Part development a whole lot easier than it would have been otherwise thanks to their creation of the SmartPart. They evolved it multiple times since then to keep up with technological changes.  And that’s just one of many things Patrick and those with whom he worked did for the community as a whole.
• If you were privy to any prerelease training on WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007, you have Patrick and Ted Pattison to thank for it. One of the best decisions I made back in 2005 was to hand Patrick and Ted the keys to the kingdom, meaning unbridled access to the development teams and a cooperative relationship with the documentation team. I hooked them up with the Developer and Platform Evangelism team, which led to them developing all the early adopter development training for Microsoft partners, which included worldwide delivery of that content.  Why Patrick?  Because I knew I he had the talent, the motivation, the professionalism, and anything else that might have been relevant.  I just plain trusted him. So did everyone with whom he wound up working. One of the best darned decisions I ever made.
• Even if you didn’t receive any prerelease training, a large part of the training content in existence stems from, or was inspired by, the work Patrick and Ted did.  That’s certainly true of the Microsoft Official Curriculum for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 development.
• Patrick literally wrote the book on MOSS 2007 development.  And frankly, that’s a harder job than writing the book on WSS 3.0 development (no disrespect to Ted intended), because the object models for MOSS represent a patchwork of different pieces of functionality developed by different teams, sometimes almost schizophrenically so.  To tie that all together and make it make sense was no small feat indeed.  And then, not having tired of that kind of hair-tearing, he then went out and teamed up with Lars Fastrup (formerly of Ontolica, then Mondosoft) to write the definitive book on SharePoint Search development.
• If you live in Europe, and wanted SharePoint training, you probably got it from Patrick himself or one of his cohorts at U2U, and if you didn’t, you got it from an outfit that strove for excellence because they have to compete with U2U.  Patrick and his partner, Wim Uyttersprot, built a top-notch outfit devoted to SharePoint, Office, and .NET training/consulting. They’re big on community give-back, and the consulting they do keeps their training extra relevant. When I worked for Microsoft,  it wasn’t acceptable to out-and-out endorse specific partners over others, but I no longer work for Microsoft, so let me say this in no uncertain terms: U2U is simply the best in EMEA, and is among the best worldwide, and while Patrick’s passing is terrible, U2U remains the best.
• There have been precious few conferences involving SharePoint technology at which Patrick hasn’t spoken, and hasn’t had obscenely high evaluation scores afterwards.  Knowing that Patrick was speaking motivated me to do better myself, and there are many, many others who felt the same way.

Patrick was the master of the wry, knowing smile, keeping quiet until just the right moment and saying just the right insightful thing.  He was a living example of the quiet ones being the ones you need to watch.

My heart goes out to his wife, Linda, and his daughters, Anahi and Laura.  I’ve met them multiple times, and I’ve always thought they had the patience of Job.  Her husband/their dad loved technology, loved to write, loved to teach, and loved to travel. And they let him, because he always had them in his heart and he always came home.   Except for this last time.

He wasn’t a religious man, and neither, for that matter, am I.  But given the current Scandanavian setting, I can’t help but think of an afterlife, in fact, a SharePoint Valhalla, into which Patrick just walked swinging a hammer twice the size of Thor’s.

I could go on for a lot longer, but I’ve got no better testament as to how good a guy he was than that of Terrance and Phillip, our two little Shih Tzus.  On Patrick’s first visit to my house, those dogs immediately made friends with him.  No multi-minute “intruder alert” barking at the outset.  That’s never happened before or since with anyone else. Wise dogs, those boys.

Patrick, my friend, you’ll be missed.

Adios, amigo.

Do The Math: Third Party Add-Ons Are Your Friend

Part of my job when I was in SharePoint Marketing at Microsoft, and most of my job when I was a competitive/technical subject matter expert for Microsoft’s field account teams, involved helping map product capabilities to customer requirements.  Frequently, that meant supplementing the out-of-the-box product with either (a) some customization work or with (b) the aid of a third-party add-on product.

Guess which of those two was often more readily received by salespeople (although not necessarily customers)?  Customization.  This is, in fact, how IBM sells software; they front all customer interactions in a service agreement, part of which involves the cost of the software but then depends on extensive consultant work.

Why the reluctance (some of the time) to consider third-party add-ons?  Sometimes there’s an irrational fear that the third-party will try to control the sale; I can’t really speak to that, other than to say that independent software vendors usually don’t want that at all.  What happens more often, I suspect, is plain ol’ sticker shock.

What I find troubling, and not just because I now work for Nintex, a company that creates third-party solutions for SharePoint technology, is that it’s rare that off-the-shelf third-party add-ons don’t save money…

Consider my company’s workflow product (since I know the pricing, etc.): the Enterprise Edition of Nintex Workflow costs (in the United States) $17,500 per SharePoint web front-end server.

Let’s assume you can find a SharePoint technology consultant for $200 an hour.  That would mean that he/she has just two weeks and one day (87.5 hours) to build the same functionality.  For one thing, that’s an extremely short consulting engagement.  For another thing, the odds of being able to build something like Nintex Workflow in that amount of time approach zero.  Even doubling it (let’s say you have a two-server deployment) still leaves you with one man-month and an extremely unlikely chance of approaching even a fraction of the product’s functionality.

As for why consulting sometimes feels better than add-on products, I invite discussion in the comments section.  Similarly, if you think there isn’t such a tendency, I’d welcome that, too.  Heck, if you agree and just want to vent, I’m all for that as well.

–Fitz

Wow. Last-Minute Refactoring. Releases That Take Weeks or Months instead of Years. I’m Definitely Not in Kansas Anymore.

One for the “things I don’t miss about Microsoft” list: having everyone acknowledge that a problem exists, having everyone agree that it’s serious and will result in customer dissatisfaction, that something must be done about it, and nevertheless not be able to do anything about it for up to three years (if that).

I don’t want to be unfair about it.  When you’re a giant software company and many, many interdependency issues exist among your own products (let alone those of partners), and many, many requests for good, justifiable changes get received in a steady stream, that’s a cold, hard reality.  Even a simple change could result in months of testing to make sure it does no harm.

Contrast this with what we’re opting to do with Nintex Reporting 2008.  We debuted it at TechEd North America this month.  Response has been great.  To a person, anyone who saw a demo raved about it, some in very public places.  But we also got a non-trivial number of suggestions, several of which were too good to pass up.  We also got a couple of volunteers working through database size requirements for a data warehouse covering a farm of a certain size with a certain amount of activity.

This pointed to two things we needed to do: (1) add a few extra reports, and (2) do a bit more optimizing on the way our warehouse stores data.

So we’re doing it.  Nintex Reporting will start arriving in the hands of customers next month instead of this one.  It’s for a far greater good.  And it was easy to react.  Outright fun, actually.

Welcome Joel!

We’ve secured a healthy chunk of Joel Oleson’s time over the summer to help us quickly revise and enhance Nintex Reporting 2008.  This will be good.  If we’re really fortunate, we might try to coax Joel into something more permanent.  This is, after all, a very nice place.

Holy Spit — They Actually Built It…

When I was part of the SharePoint teams, people asked me for advice all the time.  Sometimes, they even took it.  As it turns out, Nintex took a lot of it.

My stance of staying the heck out of the SharePoint databases is a matter of public record.  I wasn’t kidding then, and I’m still not kidding about it.  It’s a bad idea.  That having been said, a frequent question that came up in response involved how to report on what’s going on within SharePoint farms. 

You’ve got basically two options: walk the object model (many tools on CodePlex do this) or directly query the databases used by WSS/MOSS (don’t do this).  Or you can take a blue-sky, hybrid approach:  walk the object model and save the results to a data warehouse.  That was usually met with nods of understanding followed by cringes of understanding on just what it would take to do such a thing (no matter how much it would be worth it).

Well, Nintex did it anyway.  You’ll see it at TechEd in Orlando next week and/or on our Web site — we RTM today.

I’ll post over the next several days a few snippets about how the product works and what you can do with it (both for using it and extending it).  But the gist of it is that we — in a completely “legal”, supportable way — inspect the farm and stage nuggets o’ insight into a proper data warehouse, then provide plenty of tools for you to report on that warehouse’s contents to your heart’s content.

Details to follow.  This is fun.

Just who the heck *am* I?

I’m Mike Fitzmaurice, Vice President of Product Technology at Nintex, a company that makes products that augment Microsoft SharePoint technology. That’ll do for the moment. Visit www.nintex.com if you ‘d like to know more about that.

I spent the last ten and half years of my life at Microsoft, working in one capacity or another on information worker solutions, be that in messaging, collaboration, portals, content management, application aggregation, search, workflow, business intelligence, and a bunch of other stuff.

I started Microsoft in late 1997 in Microsoft Consulting Services, often creating collaboration and messaging solutions using MAPI, Exchange client and server add-ins, Outlook development, and plenty of other things. I was part of the consulting squad that helped the very first early adopter customers beta test “Tahoe”, which would become SharePoint Portal Server 2001, and was part of a team that authored best-practice deployment solutions for optimal usage of SPS 2001 and SharePoint Team Services in a corporate intranet. I became a Technical Product Manager in time to bring SPS 2003 and WSS 2.0 to fruition, and haven’t strayed from SharePoint-land ever since.

I haven’t been blogging for a year and a half, mainly because (a) the SharePoint Team Blog came into being and started covering content that was previously only available in my old blog or Arpan Shah’s. Secondly, my job within Microsoft changed to one that was more internally focused (I joined the SWAT team that helped Microsoft account teams with gnarly technical and/or competitive challenges), and the things I was doing weren’t really things I could share.

But I’m back now.

I’ll be blogging a lot more often now, generally about three things:

1. SharePoint technology. While I am indeed bound by a non-disclosure agreement, that doesn’t mean I received a lobotomy upon leaving Microsoft. There are plenty of things I know and very much want to share.
2. Observations of life at Microsoft and what it’s like to have just left it, what it’s like to move from an 80,000-person company to a 100-person company, etc.
3. Subject areas addressed by Nintex products, notably workflow and process automation, analysis of SharePoint farm/server/site usage, podcasting, and more.

But give me about a week before I get started. I’m going home to Canada to visit family before I jump on the Nintex bandwagon, just in time to see everyone at TechEd in Orlando (both weeks). Stop by the Nintex booth and say “hi” if you can.

Sorry, but this will have to be a trade secret-free zone…

As much fun as it it could be using this space to leak fun tidbits of what may/may not happen in the next releases of SharePoint technology in particular and Office technology in general, it can’t happen. It should come as no surprise that I signed a non-disclosure agreement with Microsoft the day I was hired way back in 1997, and as such much of what I know (or don’t know) about What Is Yet To Come will have to be placed in a cognitive lock box.

The best you can hope for is the fact that I’m obviously not going to advocate practices, techniques, etc., that won’t have a good chance of long-term viability. Similarly, if I’m bullish on something, it’s probably got a future. There’s nothing in my NDA that says I have to pursue fruitless paths just to misdirect people.

So my opinions will remain informed ones, but may often have to remain without supporting data points.