Welcome to the inaugural post of The Pointed Man blog.
This blog will cover topics related mainly to a phenomenal MS Platform; SharePoint 2007. I fully expect to place postings on this site that relate to both SharePoint Development and Administration along with the occasional sidebar into other topics...
Who I Am:
I am the founder of the Twin Cities SharePoint Camp in Minnesota.
I am the Lead SharePoint Developer/Administrator Technical Instructor at New Horizons of Minnesota.
I have been in the IT Industry fully for over a Decade but have worked with computers for most of my life.
I am the progenitor of much of the SharePoint Courseware you might see while taking a course from New Horizons of Minnesota: I wrote the Mastering SharePoint 2007 Administration course , I re-wrote the labs and in a couple of cases wrote completely new labs for the SharePoint Developer course that collaborated with Ted Pattison on Inside SharePoint Products and Technologies .
Over the past decade I have at various times worked as a Contractor, Employee, Consultant, and Instructor across 5 different States. I have worked with SharePoint in some capacity since the late SharePoint 2001 era, worked extensively with Administration and some Development/Customization work in SharePoint 2003, and now work with all facets of SharePoint Admin, Dev, and Customization.
I first entered the IT industry working as a developer on VB4, VBA, SQL 6.5, and Access 2.0, and have since branched out into the three main areas of IT; Developer, Administration, and Database.
I hold numerous industry credentials: MCT, MCAD, MCSD, MCSA, MCSE, MCDBA, MCTS, MCPD, Master CIW, etc...
My First computer was a Commodore 64 (had to save for a year to afford it.... then save for another year to purchase the 1541 Disk Drive...[editors note: Man, that was weird, I could almost hear my Dad in that statement... "When I was your age... I had to Program uphill... both ways... and we didn't have Ones AND Zeroes we could only afford the Zero's... you have it easy..."] That, my friends was a VERY long first year... spent mostly typing in page after page of code from Byte Magazine articles and then leaving the C-64 on for days so that I wouldn't "lose" the program as I had no way to save it off...
Finally, I enjoy Motorcycling (2003 100th Anniversary Harley-Davidson Wide Glide; I am a former Motorcycle Safety Foundation Instructor [over 10 years, trained over 800 budding motorcyclists]), Scuba Diving (PADI Certified Dive Master), I enjoy photography (currently shooting a Canon EOS 450 Rebel Xti [EF-S 17-85mm IS, 17-40mm L series, 70-300mm IS, and a couple of prime lenses...]), and I play the Harp, Piano, and am working on the Bagpipes... and last but not least I am passionate about technology and SharePoint in Particular.
My Pointed Man Nome de plume arises out of my dual passions for SharePoint and Music; Namely, that my belief with SharePoint is those who claim it cannot do x, have never truly tried... All things are possible through SharePoint; and one of my favorite Movies/Albums when I was younger; Harry Nilsson's The Point! where a little round headed kid living in a land where everything and everyone has a physical point (e.g. the people have pointed heads) is banished to the pointless forest where he meets the pointed man who depending on your point of view is pointing at everything or nothing... but I digress... if you would like to watch it online you may do so here (the pointed man appears for the first time in part 4 about 2:40 in).
Enjoy!
Jim Ferguson
The Pointed Man
And now for something completely different...