BMS Blog: SBS Consulting in the UK

I’ve been meaning to find out more about Sharepoint 2010 for some time now but what with CRM customisations and trying to implement the CRM Customer Portal Accelerator (which I  still haven’t finished) I’ve just not had the time so it was good to get an insight into what Sharepoint can do from AMITPRO’s very own “Mr Sharepoint”, Andy Parkes.

Andy gave an excellent demonstration of how to build a helpdesk system from Sharepoint 2010 with very little effort and programming knowledge. It took less than an hour to get from a vanilla install to a functioning helpdesk system with auto-generated alerts/emails, historical case info etc. I had no idea Sharepoint was as flexible as Andy’s demo proved and I’m very excited to get on and learn more. I’m particularly interested in how it can integrate with MS CRM and was going to look at using it as a customer facing portal for ticket management (I might still do that if I can’t get the Customer Portal Accelerator up and running soon!)

While I was digging around for info I came across this MS keynote video from Microsoft UK’s Architect Insight Conference and was interested in the comments Terry Smith (Senior Director, Partner Technology Unit) regarding the “tooling” now available in Sharepoint and the joined up thinking around integration with Visual Studio etc.

I probably shouldn’t be looking at this stuff as I’m going to get dragged back in to working in the business rather than on it if I’m not careful but sometimes the geek in me surfaces for a while and then it’s hard to get it back in the box!

Here’s another very short video about Black Marble and how they have embraced the Microsoft stack. This one focuses on their experience of Sharepoint.

As I mentioned before this really does provide us with the confidence that investing time and money in Sharepoint training will be worthwhile for us as we continue to build on our infrastructure implementations. For anyone looking to resell MS BPOS this sort of training will be essential to leverage the  consultancy opportunities around Sharepoint and other cloud services.

While trawling the ‘net earlier I came across this Sharepoint blog which has some interesting content worth reviewing - worth dropping in your RSS feeds!