Since the early days of SharePoint, there have always been more SharePoint jobs than SharePoint people. And while many IT Pros have wondered about their future in the Office 365-centric universe, I continue to hear from customers and rival consulting firms that they are struggling to find enough people to staff their projects.In short, there is still tremendous opportunity around the SharePoint space.
One trend that we've seen, as of late, is the movement of seasoned experts from the field into large customers and ISVs. Even Microsoft has been snapping people left and right, recognizing value in those who have played a role in developing and supporting the SharePoint community. I've stopped being surprised when I hear of someone making the move from consultant to vendor or customer. Good for them.
One such move came recently by Adam Levithan, who I met a couple years back through the SharePoint Saturday circuit. Adam was at a large consulting firm, working with customers and slowly expanding his sphere of influence through evangelism activities -- and at one point reached out to me about doing some joint webinars. He recently joined SharePoint ISV juggernaut Metalogix (which I left in September last year, where I served as Chief Evangelist) and has moved into a Product Management role. While still very active in the community, I reached out to Adam to share a bit more about the role change:
[CB] Adam, while I've known you for a couple years now, please remind me of your background. When did you get started with SharePoint?
[AL] I started my SharePoint career in 2006 as an independent consultant working on SharePoint 2007 portals, and soon there after as a Learning Tree trainer. My focus as a consultant was not on SharePoint itself, but on choosing the right tool for the right job - it happened to be SharePoint at the time, and obviously ever since. This has continued to be my focus. In the Learning Tree courses Dux (Raymond Sy) taught me that it is not IF SharePoint can do it, but WHY do you as the business want it. I worked my way up from hands on InfoPath/Workflow development to managing a small SharePoint team, and then a network operations team supporting a government agency.
After managing the Network Operations team I had a choice between a future in management or more detailed SharePoint. I opted for SharePoint and worked as Consultant developing Internets, Intranets and business solutions. It was great to be part of a cutting edge firm, especially after coming out of government support, and was really able to dive deep into SharePoint 2013 and O365 as it’s new incarnation was being rolled out. Using these skills I wanted to try something a little different and am lucky to live in an area where there are a lot of collaboration focused ISVs (and in this case Metalogix). I wanted to see how I could use me experience with the SharePoint tool to affect more than just our customers as a consultant.
[CB] Now, tell me about your current role, the segments that are covered by the products you support, and so forth. How different is the Product role?
[AL] So, the funny thing about my role as Product Manager, is that I’m now going back to the Network Operations roots that were built several years ago. My responsibility is to own the Replicator and Diagnostic Manager products at Metalogix. These products are really focused on being invisible to the main customers, business stakeholders, that I've been working so closely with. There is value to the end-user, but now I’m working with IT Managers, SharePoint Administrators and CIOs to understand the struggles that hinder the use of SharePoint across the world. It’s very exciting to be working with some of the largest organizations in the world and see how these tools can assist in saving time and allowing the end-users to focus on their work and not on technology.
[CB] How has the transition been from consulting to product? Clearly there are differences in the day to day activities – what is different as far as your technology focus? How much of your prior experience are you able to leverage in your new role?
[AL] I’ve only been in the role for a few weeks, but I can share with you my experience so far. Consulting and Product skillsets are very complimentary but there’s an approach that is almost completely opposite. As a consultant, I lead the charge with thought leadership that was built on working with experts in the product and based on hands on experience with customers, that created an overall knowledge of how things “could be”. Then, when working directly with the client I was responsible for taking that knowledge and applying general approaches where needed, and customizing the solution to specific needs in most cases. As a Product Manager I’m still leading with thought leadership, but now have a much wider variety of customers to learn from and identify key opportunities to make supporting SharePoint easier. One difference between these roles is the end products (no pun intended), as a consultant it is usually specific to a single customers pain, while with Product Management it is taking the most pain from a variety of clients and applying for all to benefit.
I was very lucky to come from a consulting organization that uses agile development principals to build requirements and work with a set of developers who could take those requirements and build a focused business process solution. Those requirements have translated well, however, the deadlines and scope have certainly changed. So far as a Product Manager the scope is much more specific when creating a requirements than when I was a consultant. Especially with my Replicator product that supports 2007-2013 we need to look at each requirement (ok I should say Product Backlog Item) and how it will work across those environment, for example without the ribbon in the 2007 GUI.
Overall, consulting really prepared me to communicate with the wide base of product users, look at the products as a user myself, and to translate those needs to our great developers to make happen in the next release. I was also prepared to balance the resource constraints - time and people - that products face in the development life-cycle.
[CB] With details of SharePoint Server 2016 being shared at Ignite, we can finally put to rest all of those concerns that there would not be another on prem release of SharePoint. How do you see the role of the ISV changing as Office 365 slowly displaces on prem? Obviously, you can’t talk about specific strategies and roadmap, but any predictions about how the partner community will evolve to the cloud model?
[AL] I believe that the timing that O365 will take over On-Premises is greatly over-estimated.
[CB] Heresy!!! But seriously, you have to agree that O365 is growing rapidly, if not displacing on prem, then at least driving interest in hybrid solutions. How important is hybrid? What 3 things would you say that people don’t understand or don’t spend enough time planning around within their hybrid efforts?
[AL] Hybrid is… drum roll please, something IT professionals have been doing for a long period of time. I know, a surprise right? I’ve just started a blog/webinar series called “Debunking the Hybrid Dilemma” which covers this exact idea (trendy aren't I). My perspective, actually, is that the term Hybrid is similar to the popularity of “collaboration” and “social”, great marketing talking about a set of features that have existed previously but are now being bundled together to solve an issue. As a result of this perspective, that IT departments have been doing “Hybrid” forever!
Take a look at highly regulated environments where one company may have several different on-premises farms to handle different level of content compliance. These different farms can be “hybrid” sharing services, authentication, or other pieces of infrastructure. How about another common scenario over the last few years - the growth of Salesforce.com -> Hybrid too. There are many more examples that I’m sure readers can think of, but the morale of the story is to keep following the same decision making processes as before - maybe just a little faster.
The second thing I would point out is a phrase I’m trying to coin - Infrastructure as Information Architecture. As professionals focused on SharePoint we’re used to Content Types, Managed Metadata, Sites, Site Collections, Web Applications, Web Front Ends and Applications servers. Now it’s time to broaden beyond just the SharePoint infrastructure and look at cloud and hybrid as a continuum of information. Based on the importance of security, compliance, mobile access etc. Where does it make sense to keep and maintain your content. With SharePoint 2016 coming down the pipe, it’s great that it will make hybrid with O365 easier but that doesn’t mean all content can be shared across the two different locations.
Finally, I would recommend not to fully invest in the latest hybrid trends, until you apply them specifically to users needs. Everyone wants search, sure, it’s great to have the flexibility of exchange mailboxes on-premises or in the cloud, but rushing to use box/dropbox/onedrive for business for all of your fileshare content (not just an individuals) will eventually cause issues - I can’t even say what they are now - that will reduce the trust end-users have with IT. Listen to the users, let them test - embrace the solution and test to see if it really fulfills the needs.
[CB] Two years ago we were hearing so much about ESNs and pure cloud collaboration vendors. Is it me, or has that noise died down considerably? If you agree, why do you think that is the case?
The noise has died down almost completely. I believe one of the reasons is that Yammer is not at the forefront of the charge, but I was always entertained by the Yammer messaging about ESNs “The techonology is easy to use and adopt, just get a community manager, identify a use case where the ESN/Newsfeed will work, and continue to monitor. Then your social network will grow.” Sounded a lot like the verbiage we would use about SharePoint and general collaboration. Social was a great marketing word, and Newfeeds were an amazing leap forward in the technology to easily connect users however it takes a lot of cultural change to do well.
I think other tools, like Jive, Sitrion or Beezy have grabbed onto the idea that social can succeed if it’s within context, and maybe the future of the team site in O365 (wink wink) will more closely unite social aspects surrounding the context of a team or project instead of a stand alone system. People are social, and will always benefit from access to their coworkers - and the ability to trace thoughts and conversations instead of losing them within e-mail. However, ESN is not as popular as it was and will most likely not return as a phase of technology adoption again.
[CB] Stepping back and trying to look at this objectively, where do you see the biggest opportunities for partners in the 2 to 3 years ahead of us? Where do customers continue to ask for help?
[AL] There are several distinct avenues for partners, and I don’t think any one type will be able to be successful at all of them at one time. I think there will continue to be the need for organizations who provide thought leadership and technical consulting on making decisions, taking advantage of solutions, and especially with Microsoft utilization of all the features that are available. Then I strongly believe that managed services organizations will continue to thrive.
Yes, going to the cloud reduces overhead that is needed for an organization, but now more than ever the speed of change has increased resulting in the same need for domain experts. While it may be for a “solution" like O365 and all of the configuration pieces. Finally, there will always be need for customization. I believe that custom dev will happen on Azure and connect to people's environments through web services, but it will still happen.
Thanks again Adam for taking the time to respond to my questions, and we look forward to hearing more about your new role and the products you support. See you at Ignite in May!
by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community
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