Tag Archives: sharepoint maturity model

Events, SharePoint

23 Lessons from SharePoint Saturday the Conference

This past Thursday-Saturday, Alison, Nick, Ben and I repped SoftArtisans and OfficeWriter at the inaugural SharePoint Saturday The Conference. Between speaking engagements, vlogging, dance parties and running demos on OfficeWriter’s SharePoint integration, there wasn’t a whole lot of downtime, but as Sandy Ussia told me, “I’ll sleep next week.” (Plus, unless you have Freudian recall, sleeping makes for a boring blog post.) Many attendees and speakers have already published their recaps, but this one is coming to you fashionably late, in a fashionable list.

Claire:

1.       If you don’t have anything nice to say, look up. The cloud was definitely this conference’s hot topic, with everyone from Mary Jo Foley to Jeremy Thake to Joel Ward weighing in. One takeaway: Microsoft’s in-the-works Online Services Delivery Platform will bring all the hosted services into one infrastructure. Maybe it’ll be accessible through a browser-based tool bar, too. Continue reading 23 Lessons from SharePoint Saturday the Conference →

SharePoint, Women In Tech

Stories from the WIT Trenches: Sadie Van Buren

[This is the first in a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Back in April I wrote a bit about my own history, and about the problems, systemic and idiosyncratic, plaguing women who chose  a career in most sectors of the tech world. Writing it was surprisingly cathartic, and the response to it was powerful enough to make me want to push it further. Every woman in tech overcame at the very least statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. I’m so thrilled that we get to kick off with Sadie Van Buren, whom many of you already know as a dynamic voice in the SharePoint community, and as the author of the ingenious SharePoint Maturity Model. If reading Sadie’s story inspires any of you to tell yours, please feel free to email me.]

My name is Sadie Van Buren and I’m a Senior Software Engineer at Blue Metal Architects in Watertown, MA.  I’m a Microsoft SharePoint consultant and have been working with that product since late 2002.  Over the past nine years I’ve participated in about 50 implementations of the product and have acted as project manager, business analyst, developer, and solution architect.

1)      Can you take us back to your “eureka!” moment—a particular instance or event that got you interested in technology?

I’m not sure there was a specific moment.  One of my brothers gave me a new Commodore Vic-20 when I was a kid, and it may have been a disappointment to him that I mainly used it to play Q-bert.  Continue reading Stories from the WIT Trenches: Sadie Van Buren →