Linda and I did a lot of corresponding while I was at Absa, it was great to learn from each other in this space and be each other’s “go to person”.

Where do you work?
Absa Capital.

What is your job title?
Project Manager.

How many SharePoint users in the company and how many are you responsible for?
1200 – responsible for my team, however we administer most of the sites as the users tend to be cowboys and not yet mature users in the field of maintaining their own site content.

What version of SharePoint are you using and how long has your company been using SharePoint?
2007 – 3 years.

How did you learn SharePoint and how long have you been using it?
Learned Sharepoint through trial & error. Went on training at Bytes technologies.

What is the biggest challenge you face with user adoption?
Mind set change from using Shared folders/network drives to document libraries. I would also change the architecture to have the areas run on separate site collections as opposed to off a top level site which it is running off at the moment.

How are you handling governance?
We documented site governance and introduced naming conventions at the onset of rolling out Sharepoint which the users have adopted. We also have certain policies and guidelines based on best practice which users must adhere to. It was advisable introducing at the onset that later on when Sharepoint was already entrenched in the organisation.

Do you have a dedicated SharePoint team and Executive buy-in and is it helping?
We have a RTB (Run the bank) team which runs the General roll out of Sharepoint functionality (Out the box) versus the BTB (build the bank) team that focuses specifically on custom development for users. We had exec buy in, however since the Barcap/Abcap merge, these decisions are blurred and are pretty much dictated by what Barcap standards are.

If you had unlimited resources in your company and could design the ideal SharePoint dream team, what would it consist of?
The dream team would be you, Marc Len Ferna, Jacques van Niekerk and Nevena Sloan to roll out Sharepoint 2010!!

Have you built anything cool (out of box) in SharePoint that your users loved, and if so what was it?
Trackers and Dashboards as well as the Client Centric view integrated with Scan Flow Store, (this was a custom developed solution though).

What functionality do you use the most on a day to day basis?
Creating of both pages for publishing, and Team sites.

How has SharePoint changed your life?
Collaboration and sharing of information instead of using emails has been the most dramatic change in sharing and disseminating information across the organisation.

What’s the hardest thing about your job?
Getting the users to commit to their changes and moving the sites to production.

What’s the best thing about your job?
Visibly seeing the benefits of the sites being implemented improve users operations and the increase in users wanting SharePoint as a result.

What do you know about SharePoint 2010 and are you planning to upgrade?
The auto taxonomy, email integration are my biggest bug bears and would love to resolve those two issues currently. We’d like to upgrade, but unfortunately, it’s subject to Barcap decision as it would be a global roll out (could take years).