A SharePoint Do-Over

So you think your SharePoint implementation is disappointing? Try doing it over three times, which is what the media company I wrote about last year had to do, finally getting a nice intranet on the third try.

 But if you're a little more desperate, and don't want the "learning experience" of redoing SharePoint two or three times, consider this take on the "do over"--a one-day seminar offered by Mindsharp and Summit 7 Systems.

Their "SharePoint Re-Design & User Adoption Seminar" says it's "for enterprise application architects, system administrators, project managers, business analysts and other professionals responsible for the success of a SharePoint implementation at their organization." Or, to be clear, responsible, in someone's eyes at least, for the failure.

To that end, the seminar is geared especially "for those who have implemented SharePoint but have had disappointing results and need to re-design their deployment for greater business benefit and better user experience." Only 15 participants are allowed per seminar, perhaps to lessen the pain of SharePoint Gone Wrong, but perhaps also to allow for some in-depth attention to how to right it.

Two familiar names in the SharePoint community, Bill English, CEO of Mindsharp, and Ben Curry, principle architect and managing partner of Summit 7 Systems, will be leading the seminars. They are scheduled for the following dates: June 7, 2012 – Huntsville, Alabama; July 19 – Minneapolis, Minnesota; August 9 – Washington, D.C.

“This seminar is not a technical seminar.... Instead, the focus is on the business, project and strategic aspects of a SharePoint implementation,” said Ben Curry, managing partner of Summit 7 Systems. “This seminar is unique because it provides businesses with the opportunity to jump-start a disappointing SharePoint deployment and turn it into a great deployment that offers significant business value.”

If you go with the public seminar, it's $995/person ($795/person for groups of three or more); organizations that prefer a private seminar in which to lick their wounds will pay $9995 for up to 15 participants.

To learn more, you'll have to go to the two company websites, Mindsharp and Summit 7 Systems, as there's no direct link that I could find to the seminar.