About 80 percent of businesses are expected to be using SharePoint by 2010, according to Gartner. That means for the Microsoft channel community, SharePoint is a potential goldmine, a repeat revenue generator, and customer relationship builder – if you get it right.
November 4, 2008
About 80 percent of businesses are expected to be using SharePoint by 2010, according to Gartner, which means big business potential for the channel. For those channel partners looking to build a successful SharePoint practice, it pays to heed the advice of SharePoint experts with several years of experience under their belts.
Start Small
What’s very quickly becoming obvious about SharePoint 2007 is its potential not as a packaged product but as a platform for collaboration, portals, enterprise search, enterprise content management, business processes and forms, and business intelligence. That’s a lot of opportunity for solution providers to optimize SharePoint for their customers. At the same time, the breadth of SharePoint capability creates a potential pitfall for partners who jump in too soon and try to be all things to all customers.
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Define your competency, says Bob Anderson, vice president of research, SMB business at Gartner.
"For resellers, partners, and consultants, SharePoint is the brass ring, but at the same time it can also be the noose falling over their heads if they don’t have a competency before hanging out a shingle," Anderson says.
Solution providers who promote themselves as SharePoint generalists are likely to get in over their heads. Think of SharePoint as a toolkit – then pick one tool to get started. For example, the portal tool for integrating applications over the Web; the collaboration tool for interacting with suppliers or customers; for business intelligence using dashboards, Web parts, scorecards, key performance indicators (KPIs); the enterprise search tool for scanning all content and looking at both structured and unstructured data.
"The objective is to meet the business needs of your clients. Walk before you run," says Anderson.
Gold Certified Microsoft channel partner Turnberry Solutions Inc., in Blue Bell, Penn., has been working with SharePoint for a couple of years. Brett Stoutland, senior account manager, refers to the company as students of the game.
"What we’ve been leaning towards doing with SharePoint is specializing in one or two areas of SharePoint, packaging it up and offering it to our customer base," he says, noting that the company is strong in three vertical markets: telecom, pharmaceuticals, and financial services.
The result? Better customer satisfaction when you're able to identify the customers business need and match it to solution provider's expertise.
Plan for Success
That’s what Microsoft Gold Certified partner ThinkNet did when they made a strategic business decision about four years ago to spin off SharePointHQ, a separate company, based in Toronto. SharePointHQ offers training, professional services, Web parts, hosting and custom development solutions for SharePoint products and technologies.
"At that time we recognized that SharePoint made things easier for our clients and they liked it," says Hans Leuschner, chief architect at SharePointHQ.
But the SharePoint specialists recognized something else going on in the market, as well – many poor SharePoint deployments.
"We’ve seen and fixed a lot of SharePoint implementations that clearly showed a lack of knowledge or expertise," he says, while also noting accompanying customer disappointment.
To avoid poor results, he recommends training and learning. In fact, all of the company’s consultants go through SharePointHQ's courseware on SharePoint 2007.
Certainly becoming a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in SharePoint 2007 is a no brainer. It's also important to note that in spring 2009, Microsoft will roll out its Microsoft Certified Master: SharePoint Server 2007 certification.
Then there's learning by doing.
Recognizing MOSS as a large business opportunity, Microsoft Gold Certified partner Heartland Technology Group's strategy is to promote SharePoint to customers by using it internally. "Using the technology in-house we can translate that usage into a strategy with our clients," says Jane Cage, chief operating officer with Heartland Technology Joplin, Mo.
Today, the solution provider has more than half a dozen SharePoint subnets from its main SharePoint portal site. For example, there’s a human resource site for employee information; a discussion group for engineers to share ideas and problem solve; a site where sales staff and engineer can work together to scope projects; and a place to track Market Development Funds.
"The more we use it internally, the more we're able to listen to our clients and understand how we can apply it to meet their business needs," says Cage, noting that how to best explain SharePoint capabilities to a customer and match a client's needs to the product's vast range of capabilities, isn’t apparent by simply viewing SharePoint out of the box.
Thinknet's Leuschner also points out that without proper training and a clear understanding of SharePoint, it's easy to install it and look successful. "But if you don't know the details behind the technology and think through an implementation ahead of time, you'll run into walls when you try to scale it," he says.
That’s not a place solution providers want to be based on an IDC Microsoft SharePoint Server Ecosystem and Customer Usage Trends Survey published in July of 2007. According to the study, MOSS is expanding its footprint in the enterprise with organizations planning to add more users and integrate more enterprise data sources into their SharePoint environment.
"There’s more evidence that companies are increasing their SharePoint footprint within the enterprise," says Kathleen Quirk, research manager for enterprise portal at IDC.
The take away: specialize, create small wins, refine, reiterate, and expand to other areas of the enterprise. If you make SharePoint easy to use, users will like using it and will want to apply it elsewhere.
Hire a Practice Director
Thinknet looked at the SharePoint opportunity and launched a SharePoint business. Turnberry Solutions recognized that building a successful SharePoint practice required making an investment in hiring a SharePoint Practice Manager.
"Without one, everyone is doing SharePoint on the side," says Stoutland.
What does it take to be a SharePoint Practice Manager? At Turnberry that would be a SharePoint professional who is strong on both the technology side and business side. “The manager also has to be familiar with the Microsoft Partner Network and understand the Microsoft ecosystem,” he says.
Today, SharePoint represents about 10 percent of Turnberry’s revenue. The company wants to triple that figure in about eight months. With a SharePoint Practice Manager at the helm, the company can have controlled growth, taking risks but not selling more than it can produce given internal resources.
Utilize Microsoft Partner Tools
Devoting significant resources to help its channel partners launch successful SharePoint practices, savvy partners are taking advantage of Microsoft’s investments.
In addition to a plethora of Web-based resources for channel partners, Microsoft launched the SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) a partner-delivered offering, and Software Assurance benefit, designed to help customers successfully plan their deployment of SharePoint.
Participation in SDPS requires certification. Partners with Microsoft competencies in Information Worker Portals and Collaboration, Enterprise Content Management, or Search specialization qualify to become certified in SDPS. Certified SDPS partners get access to new knowledge offerings such as SharePoint Deployment Plan Templates, Architecture Design Guidance Documents, and SharePoint server farm deployment guidance, according to the company.
Microsoft also offers resources through the MSDN SharePoint Developer Center and Micosoft.com Training site.
Microsoft partners also report that they look for opportunities using partner program leads, share experiences via Microsoft user groups, and make sure to get themselves in front of their Microsoft Partner Area Manager (PAM).
"If we can find out where SharePoint is selling, that’s a big nugget," says Stoutland.
SharePoint is an iterative thing. "Begin with one project for the client then go on to phase two, then three, etc.," says Leuschner, noting that it’s up to the solution provider to help the client to understand all the features of SharePoint.
Follow that advice and you’re likely to have a client for a long time along with referrals.