My name is Jeremy Syme, and I have been delivering technology solutions for companies such as Microsoft, Bluetooth, Medtronic, Group Health Cooperative and Holland America Line for over 15 years. I am located in Redmond, Washington and am currently the Director, Systems Engineering for Bluetooth SIG. I will slowly be updating this site to have some information from my past SharePoint work as well as future endeavors. 

I am a technology geek. That’s not the badge of distinction it used to be, but I still wear it proudly. I have managed my personal email and web sites for years. I would write little bits of functionality to do things like share my calendar or collaborate on planning a wedding. It worked okay, but I usually spent more time building it than using it. As life got busier, I started looking for more packaged solutions. I usually went the open source route. It was better than I could build on my own, but it was still not as good as the tools used in my workplace. About five years ago I began running a SharePoint instance at home (yes, this is where it gets very geeky). It was great, but despite all sorts of networking wizardry it just was not that useful when I was not at home. User adoption of my home SharePoint solution plummeted—granted I was dealing with a user base of two people.
My technology needs had out grown my infrastructure and my ability to support what my users—okay what I—demanded. Office 365 came to the rescue. For far less than I spend on coffee each month, my household is now equipped with enterprise class email and collaboration tools.

• Family tree modeled in Managed Metadata – Done
• Appliance maintenance history calendar – Done
• Extranet site for collaborative planning of family reunion – Done
• Email and Calendar push to my Windows Phone – Done
• Integrating my TiVo via BCS – Maybe this summer

There are some things that I just can’t do with Office 365. I won’t be using PerformancePoint anytime soon to analyze the sleeping, eating and diaper patters of my new born daughter. Even though I would love to do that, Office 365 doesn’t support several Enterprise features like PerformancePoint, RecordsCenter or PowerPivot. Despite that limitation is a tremendously valuable tool. The best part is that I can access it from anywhere and I don’t have to spend Saturday nights applying the latest updates to my home server.
While my example here is likely extreme for most households, they are run-of-the-mill for many businesses.

• Company structure modeled in Managed Metadata
• Company payroll and holiday calendar
• Extranet for managing supplier relationships
• Enterprise email and calendaring using tools employees know
• Surface data out of your internal systems using BCS

It is easy to see how my domestic use of SharePoint can easily map to the management of your business. Office 365 has removed the barrier to entry for enterprise class communication tools for small to mid-sized business. You can be up and running in a very short amount of time and we would love to help you get there

Allyis has completed dozens of SharePoint 2010 projects since the beta product launched in 2009. While each project presents its own challenges and innovations, there are a few uses of SharePoint that seem to appear time and time again.
CollaborationI know. You navigated all the way to this blog, just to hear that SharePoint is still used as a collaboration tool. There is nothing Earth shattering here, but this is good opportunity to reflect on how far our little online file sharing tool has come.  In SharePoint 2010, collaboration has fully matured. Outlook integration, SharePoint Workspace and Access allow nearly full-fidelity access to your data off-line.  There is no more waiting until each person is done with their document edits before you can start. With Office web apps and Office 2010 integration, everyone can work on those documents in real-time at the same time. So, yes SharePoint is still heavily used for collaboration, but make no mistake this is not your father’s collaboration.
Intranet siteWhat is an intranet? This is not as simple a question as it may seem on the surface. In general when we speak of an intranet we are talking about two different types: collaboration and content publishing.  Content publishing is what many think of as a classic intranet site. This is largely content that is presented for consumption by the employee base. There may be some interaction with that information, but it is not collaboration. Collaboration in this context refers not only to document and data collaboration, but social computing and business process management, among others. SharePoint in uniquely positioned to provide extraordinary functionality in both categories of intranets. Most intranets do reflect some level of each type.
SearchSearch is one of those items that when it is doing its job well no one notices. When search is bad, everyone notices. Good thing for us that search in SharePoint 2010 is great. Bad news is that it largely applies to the Standard and Enterprise editions. Search faceting via metadata, external content searching and query suggestion make SharePoint search a serious player. If true Enterprise search is your bag, then you can’t do any better than FAST. It will hold its own against any other enterprise search tool out there. I didn’t forget about people search. That’s a big enough deal to garner its own section.
Employee DirectoryPeople search in SharePoint rocks. If you are like me, then you still remember the days when the company printed a new employee directory every quarter. New employees did not exist until that new directory came out! With the user profile service not only can you search active directory, but go ahead and toss in other data sources and allow your employees to input their own data.  Throw in presence awareness and a Silverlight organizational chart and you will never see your organization the same way again.
Business Process ManagementI’ll admit my bias on this one. I think SharePoint’s real brilliance shines in business process management. SharePoint’s support for workflows is extraordinary. There is something for everyone when you consider out of the box workflows, SharePoint designer workflows or Visual Studio developed workflows. Toss in forms, external content types and all of the enterprise features like Excel services and you can revolutionize your organization. This is an area where organizations are just beginning to see the possibilities. I think 2012 will be a big year for significant movement in this space.
SharePoint of course has many uses beyond these too, and with proper planning SharePoint could easily become the platform your organization uses most.

One of the most exciting features in SharePoint 2010 Foundation (the “free” one) is the inclusion of Business Connectivity Services (BCS). This feature allows you to access data outside of SharePoint, surface it and interact with it as though it were native SharePoint lists!
In SharePoint 2007 you had to upgrade to the server version (MOSS) to get access to this sort of functionality. Of course, nothing comes completely for free and there are some limitations. The main limitation comes with how you connect to SQL databases. With SharePoint Foundation, unless you want to give each user access to the SQL database, you will need to specify SQL credentials to use. This involves a little extra work, but is worth the effort.
This blog does a great job of walking you through the steps:
http://wyldesharepoint.blogspot.com/2010/06/setting-up-external-content-...
Just note that in his example of the modified .bdcm file, the elements and attributes need to have initial capital letters. Here is the corrected example:
<Properties>
<Property Name="AuthenticationMode" Type="System.String">PassThrough</Property>
<Property Name="DatabaseAccessProvider" Type="System.String">SqlServer</Property>
<Property Name="RdbConnection Data Source" Type="System.String">DB Server Name</Property>
<Property Name="RdbConnection Initial Catalog" Type="System.String">DB Name</Property>
<Property Name="RdbConnection Pooling" Type="System.String">True</Property>
<Property Name="RdbConnection User ID" Type="System.String">SQL User Name</Property>
<Property Name="RdbConnection Password" Type="System.String">SQL User Password</Property>
<Property Name="RdbConnection Integrated Security" Type="System.String">False</Property>
<Property Name="ShowInSearchUI" Type="System.String"></Property>
</Properties>