In this exciting article I explain my personal thoughts on why I think Portal Solutions acquiring Allin Consulting is a good thing for our clients, colleagues, and the many people who rely on us for trusted SharePoint advice. For those who have any questions outside of official channels feel free to email me or comment here.
Portal Solutions and Allin Consulting from today are a single company that actively delivers business value by leveraging the Microsoft SharePoint product platform. Both companies are focused long term relationships with their customers and have excellent track records of delivering successful solutions. See the full press release here.
For the past two years I have been working at Allin Consulting helping people take SharePoint to the next level, or get a handle on their existing SharePoint deployments. The role that I play in many engagements is one which lets me work on a variety of challenges from strategic ones that involve vendor selection, to the very specific ones that involve automating or improving a key business process with a simple SharePoint designer workflow. The roles SharePoint fills are as varied as the ways businesses apply it to solve their problems. The roles architects, consultants, and experts like you most likely fill as a result are just as varied. (Speaking of which, I will try and build a list of things that we see people using SharePoint for… but more on that in a future post.)
At a personal level I get to learn from and work with more SharePoint experts…
For those who work with SharePoint when I say one person can’t know everything you understand how true this is when dealing with SharePoint challenges and projects. One of my favorite things about working for a consultancy that understands this is that we work as a team and regularly build proposed solution architecture as a collective exercise which makes it easier (since we can leverage our collective experience) and it results in a better product at the end of the day for the people we work with (our clients).
One of the exciting factors of now working with Portal Solutions is that we now have a much larger set of experts to collaborate with internally, and to bounce ideas off one another as we develop the right solutions for business problems. What’s more the culture at Portal Solutions is almost identical to our own. Collaboration, team work and sharing, and how people engage one another is just as important for them as it is for us.
Why I am excited for the community (as always)…
Portal Solutions has a strong history of actively supporting the SharePoint community and has released helpful content on CodePlex (http://portalsolutions.codeplex.com/), provided free webinars, sponsors SharePoint Saturdays, and as a company understands the importance of the community. For those who know me at a personal level you understand how important this is to me.
For the past two years Allin Consulting has been doing it’s best to support, foster, and grow community awareness, understanding and value. Rob Windsor who works at Allin Consulting regularly delivers excellent SharePoint development sessions for new developers and experienced developers (here are a few examples: Data Access Options in SharePoint & Integrating SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio Lightswitch). David Pileggi who also works at Allin Consulting regularly shares his experiences, thought leadership, and cautions against some of the very real dangers that SharePoint can present (here are a few examples of his great talks: SharePoint Security Through the Looking Glass & SharePoint Planning a Labyrinth of Choices).
Between the passion, enthusiasm and support for the SharePoint community everyone in our new organization has to the sponsoring of local user groups, and support of free SharePoint resources Allin Consulting and Portal Solutions are awesome community focused SharePoint professional services firm to work at.
I am excited to see how much the combined experience and collective intelligence Portal Solutions/Allin Consulting will benefit the community as we share more, build more codeplex solutions, and help give back to the community that has always been so wonderful to us.
Looking to the future…
The future of SharePoint services requires organizations to focus on delivering solutions that provide measurable business benefit. Generally speaking the number of people implementing the platform for the first time is significantly diminishing and most people are determining how to capitalize or benefit more significantly from their initial SharePoint platform investments, and that is where I think Portal Solutions can really benefit organizations based on their considerable experience.
The name of the company alone accentuates this critical point: What solutions can we provide leveraging your existing investments? (In this case those that often are based around Portals, though the solutions they have delivered clearly go far beyond just Portal related challenges.) What excites me about both of our companies working together is that we are focused on what’s next, what’s coming, and how to help organizations prepare and keep up with the blistering pace of technology innovation.
I have heard about Portal Solutions from clients, colleagues, and peers in the industry for the past few years and what I hear is extremely positive. The people I have met at Portal Solutions are all extremely bright, friendly, and honest. They are the kind of people I enjoy working with (and who make my job so much easier).
At the end of the day both organizations are made up of passionate, intelligent and capable people. This isn’t a merger of two companies as much as a merger of two families or two groups with mutual interest, passion, understanding, and commitment to helping organizations achieve greater success through the application of technology.
Hope you are as excited as I am for what is to come,
Richard Harbridge
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