An Interview with Tom Sigler – A NewsGator Solution Architect

NewsGator Social inSites (NG): What is your role at NewsGator?

Tom: I'm a Solution Architect for NewsGator’s professional services organization. My role is to help customers who'd like to take their SharePoint and Social Sites deployments to the next level, helping guide them through their portal development projects, third-party software integration, and branding efforts. My key goal is to make sure I help companies accomplish what they need while driving industry standards and best practices.

NG: What percentage of customers request some type of custom development during a Social Sites/SharePoint implementation?

Tom: I’d say around 60% of our customers are doing something custom in their SharePoint environment (Social Sites aside). It seems like at a minimum, most are looking to either roll out a new intranet brand with their 2010 deployment, or want to know how to integrate their existing brand with Social Sites.  Other popular requests tend to be for custom Social Sites web parts, automating site provisioning with community sites and integrating external systems into the activity stream. Customers love the fact that we provide a public API, which covers a lot of the functionality available through the browser interface. It really opens up a lot of possibilities.

NG: Has that increased or decreased with the migration from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010?

Tom: It’s definitely increased. Everyone is launching branding efforts right now because of their upgrade/rollout to SharePoint 2010. For companies who have branded their 2007 portals, the UI for 2010 is just so different that it's a good time to roll out an updated look and feel. At a minimum, organizations will need to update their interface to account for the Office Ribbon, which is new in SharePoint 2010. Overall, it seems more companies are getting comfortable with enterprise social computing technology, and are looking at ways they can extend their platform to increase collaboration.

NG: Customers obviously have to think about extra costs and longer implementation time with customization, what are some other considerations customers should weigh before going the most custom route?

Tom: Well first of all, if you're still on SharePoint 2007, I'd say hold back on the customizations as much as possible since it can increase the complexity and work needed when you decide to upgrade to SharePoint 2010. With regard to costs, it's good to keep in mind that when you are customizing a platform, there is more than just up front costs. Don't forget to factor in the expense of keeping things running, fixing bugs, making tweaks, etc. The further you go from out of the box, the more your maintenance costs are probably going to be. Lastly, consider your overall IT roadmap. Are you going to continue hosting IT services internally? Are you looking at moving into the cloud at some point? Cloud services definitely have their upside, but tend to restrict what types of customizations you can do. This is true with SharePoint Online, which does allow for some types of custom development, but certainly not on the same level as you would have hosting it on premise.   

NG: What are some positive outcomes of a customization project?

Tom: I think organizations really benefit when they make their intranet portal their own. It’s a great way to help cement company culture and can really help drive user adoption. I think what SharePoint offers out of the box is great, but I believe it requires a little bit of customization to provide an awesome user experience. 

NG: What are some best practices you would recommend a customer think about and follow once they realize they need to do some customization work? Anything to avoid?

Tom: You definitely want to avoid any customizations that put you in an unsupported state if possible.  Social Sites follows a similar path as SharePoint, don't modify the product directly and use the frameworks in place to do what you need. This means using SharePoint solutions and features to push out custom functionality. You're not supposed to modify the internal CSS and script files for example, it's better to deploy your own and go from there.

NG: How does a customer work with NewsGator on a customized solution? Do you bring partners into the mix?

Tom: We usually scope things out prior to deployment so we have an idea of what customizations a customer is looking to do. We can provide services in any capacity, whether that is a purely consulting role, as an augmentation to internal staff or with a partner, to being the sole provider for services.  We're in a great position to provide not just Social Sites services but SharePoint services as well, since we work with a wide array of companies with SharePoint deployments. These deployments range from environments that support anywhere from a couple thousand users, all the way up to Fortune 50-sized organizations.

NG: If you were a CTO at a Fortune 50 company with SharePoint 2007 and you wanted to bring enterprise social computing to your company what route would you take and why? 

Tom: I'd definitely recommend upgrading to SharePoint 2010 with Social Sites, and I don't say that because I work here! If you're on SharePoint 2007 already, there's a good chance it's pretty well ingrained in your organization, so it just makes sense to go with 2010. Having worked on both platforms, I can definitely say both SharePoint and Social Sites have matured greatly. A lot of customer feedback and experience went into these products, so your organization is going to benefit from this.

It's especially evident when it comes time to scale a Fortune 50-sized company, now that both Social Sites and SharePoint 2010 support multi-farm architectures. This is absolutely necessary with companies who are geographically dispersed. Another important thing to consider is if your users are already using SharePoint, it just makes sense to extend the collaboration capabilities within your existing system.  Social Sites takes advantage of an already good platform and makes it better. Your users won't have to go elsewhere to use disparate social platforms, which I believe can hinder adoption. As a user, if you can keep me in a single platform for collaboration, that makes it much simpler for me to do my job.