Centric is my baby. Who am I? Glenn Laugesen. A number of years ago (think 1997) I started out in self employment with a formal Electrical Engineering background, providing Computer Aided Design (CAD) services to industrial clients on a contract basis.
Along the way, I branched into many areas that were related to CAD, such as computer systems, file and data management and later on (2004 to present), software development.
I formed a company (in 2002), and grew my CAD contracting business. My involvement with my clients often extended well beyond just supplying CAD draughting and design services though, and for one large corporate client in particular, I was (and still am) involved, in various ways, in maintaining and developing their document management and sharing systems. Extending as far as developing software for them in this area.
I learn't many things about business, realtionships, communication and information management along the way and found that I was keenly interested in information/document management and distribution systems. Not only was I interested, but it appeared an area the most companies didn't do well - in that they weren't really taking advantage of the systems that they had, in making the vast amounts of information that they had stored in assorted files and databases, often hidden away in obscure places on internal network drives, easily accesible to users. Specifying, building and maintaining servers and networks was also part of the process and I built and hosted web applications for access by clients on our systems.
Sounds geeky I know, but then I'm a geek.
Back in 2005-2006 I wrote a document publishing and sharing software application for a major client. As part of the process and before undertaking development of a custom peice of software, I investigated other options that they might use "off-the-shelf" to do what they needed. SharePoint was available at the time, and was looked at as a possible solution to their needs. Ultimately, it was rejected though as many other users and developers who had used it appeared to have a long list of shortcomings and weaknesses. The general consesus appeared that while it was good in concept and had some strengths, it was still 'immature' in general. So, I went ahead with the custom software development and it was subsequently completed and installed on their network. I also ran a hosted version on a server on my system to provide restricted external access to data and this ran for a couple of years until things changed and SharePoint version 3.0 finally came along.
SharePoint 3.0 was a different beast to its earlier incarnations. Microsoft had given it an overhaul both under the hood and from a user perspective. At last, we really had a solidly usable and scalable web platform for building collaborative sites and services on, which was also fully functional out-of-the-box. I invested heavily in learning and implementing SharePoint then as I saw that it really had potential (and will have even more in the new releases!). I set up experimental web sites with it initially and then after signing an agreement with Microsoft, officially began hosting SharePoint for clients.
Since then we've been providing hosted SharePoint, Project Server and custom Exchange email services to our clients for a number of years. We now have both the 2007 and 2010 versions of SharePoint running on our rack mounted servers right here in our own micro-datacentre. We don't host on rented servers half way around the world. Some might argue that it's cheaper to use others infrastructure and play the middleman and simply re-sell someone elses service, but then that places limits on the level of service that you can offer to your clients.
And if I had to emphasise one thing that I have learnt about myself throughout all of this, it is this: I don't like limits.