At id we believe honesty is the best policy. So with that in mind here’s the bad news about SharePoint projects.

Not all of them are successful!

In fact, if you start to Google around you’ll find that quite a few that failed. All too often a SharePoint project doesn’t quite to live up to expectations or ends up cost significantly more than originally planned.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

SharePoint projects work best when SharePoint is deployed in a way that fits your business and delivers to your business needs. Microsoft were so keen to ensure that SharePoint gets deployed correctly that they got their best SharePoint experts together to produce the SharePoint Deployment and Planning Services (SDPS). SDPS is a set of preplanned consultancy engagements designed to get the right bits of SharePoint deployed in the right way for your organization to use. SDPS consultancy can only be provided by Microsoft Gold Partners who have demonstrated their expertise in SharePoint and obtained the necessary SharePoint certifications. Needless to say, at id we are authorized to provide SDPS consultancy to assist with your SharePoint deployment needs.

The really good news is – if you have the correct level of software assurance benefits your SDPS engagement could be free! Microsoft will pay id to come and do the work with you!

Of course, just deploying SharePoint and walking away would be about as much use as throwing your money down a really deep well. To get value out of SharePoint your users need to be trained in how to use it and get the most out of it. They need to adopt it into their everyday work and your administrators need to know how to look after it. To this end, we are authorised training partners for Critical Path Training, the premier SharePoint training company. We offer the complete range of Critcal Path's SharePoint 2010 training courses in our Raby Bay training room

SharePoint is very successful. Too successful some people might argue. Your recruitment consultant will tell you it's very difficult to find really good SharePoint people to work in your SharePoint teams. There just aren’t the candidates available with the right skills.

If you’re using a recruitment consultant to find your SharePoint people you’re just away throwing good money after bad.

The problem starts with the job advert – Wanted (preferably yesterday) – SharePoint Developer/Administrator/Web design Guru. Must have 6+ years of SharePoint 2007 experience, in depth knowledge of web parts, InfoPath, Exchange, SQLServer, complete Microsoft BI Stack, XML, HTML, CSS, XSLT, XML(again), PMT. Confident communicator, good team player, able to work under own initiative to tight deadlines for much less money than I can stiff the client for...

So, your recruitment consultant will try to find you an unemployed SharePoint expert with more skills and experience than the developers who build SharePoint for Microsoft in Redmond. If you’re really lucky they won’t find you anyone. If you're unlucky they’ll send you an unemployed .NET developer who cut and paste your advert onto their CV. You will then spend the next 3 months or so paying that developer to learn SharePoint while making all their first timer mistakes on your project.

You don’t know what you need; your recruitment consultant doesn’t know what you need – let us help you. The truth is the mix of people you need depends upon what you are trying to do. SharePoint is a big product and not everything is required to solve your business problem. More than likely you’ll need a range of people to provide different skills at different times in the project. Our Contractor Plus service is designed to provide you exactly that – great SharePoint people plus all the benefits of engaging with us as a SharePoint expert Gold Partner.

Talk to us, tell us what your trying to achieve and we’ll take it from there.

Building SharePoint solutions is what we do. We’ve spent a lot of time doing it, thinking about how to do it better, learning best practices from SharePoint experts, learning from our mistakes and building solution accelerators to allow us to do it better, smarter and faster in the future.

From our development centres in Brisbane and Nottingham we can offer around the clock expertise capable of designing, building and delivering even the most complex collaboration, business intelligence, customer management and workflow solutions.

Talk to us about how we can use that experience to deliver your solution. Talk to us about what you want to achieve and we’ll come up with the ideas as to how we can get you there.

We will use an agile and iterative approach to development, building your solution "step by step", showing our progress and getting your feedback each step of the way. Where difficult concepts need to be explained we will create a mock up. Where a user interface needs to be designed we will create wireframes/screenshots to discuss.

The quality of the solution we create will ultimately depend on the quality of the discussions we have throughout the development. Unlike more traditional development setups we'll be one team, all pulling in the same direction - the delivery of a solution that meets your business requirements.

Other development teams advocate the waterfall approach, the top down "let’s write a 100 page specification", put it under change control and wrap it in the contract. We don’t. It doesn’t work and so we don’t do it.

SharePoint is not cheap. If you’ve already paid to implement it into your organization we think you’ve made a wise move. The trick is to make sure your users are using it to its full potential, getting the most business value for the investment you have made.

When you decide you need more formal training, we offer the a range of off the shelf and bespoke training options.

We are always avaiable to lend a hand. We can offer SharePoint Administrator and Architect services on a day rate basis. High end SharePoint skills a extremely difficult to find and this can be a great way to strenghten your in-house team without blowing out you wage bill.

Microsoft Office 365 is Microsoft's SharePoint in the Cloud offering

Office 365 is a set of Microsoft latest hosted messaging and collaboration solutions consisting of Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint® Online and Lync (Communications and live meeting).

These Online Services are designed to give you business streamlined communication with high availability, comprehensive security and simplified IT management. Your business benefits from always using the most up-to-date technology that is deployed rapidly, maximizing your valuable IT resources and reducing your need for infrastructure investments.

We are so confident of the Office 365 platform that we are using it to power our own business, which gives us unique insights to pass onto our customers.

• Sign up today for you free 30 day trial!