We hosted the first event of its kind on 20 October 2016 – The Lets Collaborate SharePoint Specialist of the Year Award; in recognition of the unsung heros using SharePoint. We are pleased to report that the event was a massive success and lasted until the wee hours of the morning.
View all the winners on the official website
View all the fancy pics on Facebook
View all the finalist bio’s on Facebook
Follow the #SharePointAwards feed on Facebook
The finalists were put through rigorous testing, background checks, social media stalking and reference checks. The decision was a real tough one and the standard exceptionally high. In the end though, there was only one person who had CEO and CIO support and who got the CEO to blog on SharePoint. Maureen Zulberg from Voltex did that.
She’s a one-woman SharePoint band in a 1500 people company. She single-handedly built their first intranet ever, with an audience who’s average age is 45 across 67 branches country-wide; and all on SharePoint 2010 Foundation with no code no less. She conceived the intranet from scratch, toured the entire country gathering requirements, built it all herself, maintains it, designs competitions for it, trained people to use, adds new content weekly, and keeps getting more and more people to love it.
She took their product catalogues of hundreds of pages, and split them into individual documents and tagged them with the page number in the catelogue, what it was for, how many pages each item was. She has the cleanest data I have personally ever seen on an intranet. She invented Selfie Saturday to get the branches to feel more part of the business.
Their CEO is quoted as saying :” She single-handedly changed the culture of the company; her ethic is astounding and her focus unequivocal. They just don’t make them like her anymore. I have to keep blogging, because she’ll take me down if I don’t!”.
Their CIO is quoted as saying that : “the intranet she built has such a huge return on investment for us we can’t even measure it. I can see a distinct difference in the before and after in the company since she launched it. The 67 branches felt completely lost and separate from the business. Since Maureen put the intranet in, they have felt part of the group and understand what the group does. I’ve seen other SharePoint intranet’s, they’re little more than document repositories. V-Connect is another level completely. She pushes me to do more too. She’s been there a long time and has built the relationships with staff and management that has resulted in this good adoption, because they listen to her.”
What can we say; we can only agree with both of them.
In a world where job-hopping is becoming the norm, Maureen is a shining example of what you can achieve when you stick something out and build relationships with everybody over many years. It’s taken her a mere 3 and a half years to go from zero to this hero! Congratulations Maureen! You are a true legend. We are sure Voltex is crazy proud of you, we know we are.
So that’s your benchmark people. Nominations for the next event open in January 2017. Do you have what it takes to make the finals and then to win? Start working towards it.
Views from Veronique 
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