A new company dedicated to helping you with SharePoint.

After more than 6 months of planning, preparation, documentation, meetings, research and most of all, hard work, it gives me great pleasure to announce our launch.

As some reading this will know, I've been involved with SharePoint since before it was born. I was one of those in the audience at the Microsoft Technical Briefing, in January 1999, that announced project "Tahoe", and it had a profound impact on my career. Ever since that moment, I have been working with companies, of all shapes and sizes, in a range of industries and in over 25 different countries, create solutions, evaluate, deploy and fix, Microsoft SharePoint. 

Throughout this time, all but the last year of it at Microsoft, I have enjoyed watching the product grow, watching the community around it thrive, and in my own humble way contributed back, mostly via Point2Share (http://blogs.msdn.com/daniel_mcpherson & the now redirected http://www.point2share.com). Even someone who believes in the product as much as I do could never have predicted the explosive year that 2007 was for SharePoint. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) will be remembered as the breakthrough release, as Windows 3.0 was to Windows, MOSS 2007 is to SharePoint.

With the product growing so quickly, it was impossible to not feel like growing too. In the middle of last year I met Hans Blaauw, a SharePoint blogger, posting at http://www.points2share.com (spot the difference?). After working out who copied who (neither, it really was a coincidence, and a rare collision of brand genius <grin>) we began talking about customers, the challenges they face, about the SharePoint based solutions we had created and just what it's like to be a consultant today.

After many dinners, and working together daily on a large SharePoint project, it became clear that we both wanted to explore some emerging ideas. To try something different. As consultants, we wanted to take a fresh look at the delivery of professional services, to move engagements beyond the individual and toward a team of experts. As solution designers we saw the need for an organisation dedicated, and specialised, in SharePoint. One that could offer a creative framework that is tuned especially for it, thereby delivering faster solutions, working with, and not against, the rich platform that it has become.

zevenseas is afloat, and it's taking a fresh look at consulting, and a fresh look at the creation of SharePoint solutions.

Why zevenseas?
'Zeven' and 'Seas' because the company is rooted in both English (Australian) and Dutch.
'Seas' because each time we started to think about what the company was about, the words all seemed to start with the letter 'C'.
'Zeven' because when we really trimmed it down we were left with 7 core words that represented what we are all about.

What are the seven C's?
Collaboration, Consulting, Code, Creativity, Community, Content and Capable

Over the coming weeks I will begin to explore each of these, in just a little more detail, sharing with you the unique way in which zevenseas plans to go about meeting the needs of its clients and consultants.

Before I close, I would like to just take a little time to talk about the fantastic team that has come together. I look forward to every Friday, not because its the end of the week, but because its our team day.

Hans Blaauw is co-founder and our solution lead. Along with an uncanny ability to translate business requirements into functional design, he brings a wealth of business experience. The thing that always surprises me about Hans is his equal parts love and hate of technology. Broadly speaking technology is his passion, something he has followed to advisory roles with Skype, expertise on numerous open source platforms, and even to a strange device called a Nabaztag. It's rare that anything in the technology world gets past him, really, he is one of the few people I know who successfully drinks from the RSS fire hose. However, his approach is always to temper this enthusiasm with (un)common business sense. His pragmatic approach to creating solutions means the platform is leveraged to its strengths, and costs, both up-front and long term, are minimised.

Robin Meuré has been a friend of mine since the early days of Point2Share, and one of the first to look after me when I moved to Amsterdam 18 months ago. It was about that time that we kicked off a long running battle to see who could maintain the largest number of Feedburner readers on their blog, a race in which he has long left me behind. Quite an achievement given I've been speaking English just that little bit longer <grin>. Robins blog is a well read resource in the community and we are very lucky to have that sort of expertise within the team. He's comfortable tapping out C# or debugging broken Application Pools. I have to also thank him for the encouragement he provided over a delicious Tapas meal, his involvement in this endeavor was a key factor in me deciding to really give it a go.

Mark van Lunenburg rounds out the team. Mark worked with Hans and I on a recent project, and we were both struck by his commitment to the customer and the catalytic effect he had on the team. He is a solutions guy who understands how to leverage the SharePoint platform, meaning the wheel is not reinvented, but instead greased a little. He is new to blogging, so I hope you can give him some encouragement when he does start pressing those keys, I'm certainly keen to hear about some of the lessons he learnt while developing SharePoint solutions in a team environment using Team Foundation Server. Out of the office he dashes around the squash court as fast as he belts out workflows, while I attempt to take the RSS Reader trophy (Help! Subscribe) back from Robin, I'll be trying to get a few points back from Mark on the court.

Finally, if there is anything I can do to help, call me: +31 6226 04276 or email me: daniel@zevenseas.com