Until July 2007:

I worked (with TCSC) for the NIH, in a division called the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectuous Diseases (NIAID), first implementing SharePoint 2003 and then migrating to SharePoint 2007, including managing and participating in several different implementation projects involving those two platform technologies. My roles ran the full gamut of implementation lifecycles, including analysis, architecture, design, customization, implementation, testing, deployment planning, deployment and follow-on maintenance. I also did project management, hands-on administration, configuration, development, customization and testing, as well as planning for others to do all of these things.

I was a mentor to a small team of 6, as well as part time manager and project manager. It was a heck of a commute and somewhat stressful (as all federal goverment-sited jobs can be - strong people with strong opinions make for a dynamic team that's sometimes difficult to properly manage), but the actual material technology I worked with day to day was well worth the heartache. I guess the stress shows I really cared about what I got done at that project.

Until October 2005:

I worked (with TCSC - and am still with them) for the Department of Homeland Security (via Applied Marine Technologies, Inc, in Arlington, VA) and for Wiley Rein and Fielding (a law firm that specializes in Insurance Law). Both were more or lesser involved implementations of SharePoint 2003.

At the Department of Homeland Security, a coworker and I first did modelling and recommendations (capacity planning, data center design, network infrastructure recommendations, disaster recovery planning, and all the concommittant systems planning issues for large-scale server farm implementations with very high reliability and short fallback periods). Later int he project we worked on some complicated applications created in Microsoft Access but leveraging SharePoint for long-term storage and for multiple-author version control.

At Wiley Rein and Fielding, the effort focused on a full conversion of a legacy (VB/ASP [note: not .NET], SQL and Lotus Notes) application over to SharePoint 2003 technologies only.

Both were intensely interesting and required a great deal of self-directed effort agains tight deadlines and rapidly changing requirements.

November 3, 2007heed Martin Information Technology which was in turn contracting to the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae), part of The US Housing and Urban Development Department.

I was working as a systems architect on two concurrent projects. The first was conceived as a kiosk-type access for a network-disconnected version of an implementation of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and the associated Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, primarily for security reasons, but also to be generally as non-threatening as possible, so that potential users of a wider network-based (and more traditional architecture for SharePoint technologies) could play around in a very secure and tidy sandbox with the technology at hand. The second project was designing a useful and secure implementation of SharePoint for Ginnie Mae at large, which may eventually include not just Ginnie Mae internal employees, but also contractors. We were extremely careful with security and with designating what kinds of materials can and cannot be accessed by different users, but that's part of any architecture and engineering effort.

In the course of working on these projects, I have worked with C# and .NET, both writing and prototyping SharePoint WebParts (equivalent to portlets and portal applets and whatever else it's called in non-SharePoint portals), as well as writing command-line import tools for importing mass repositories of documents (in this case primarily scanned documents) and their associated metadata. I've also worked on information architecture issues, finding the best ways to display and provide the users various methods for getting at the data we've been importing. I've also done less heady tech stuff and customized the look and feel of the user interface, investigated where SharePoint falls short of our expectations and devised both technical and non-technical methods of getting around such issues.

Also, in my role as a systems architect, I've produced many fine pieces of internal documentation, primarily for pointing out decision points that higher decision-makers need to address and telling them the pros and cons of the most practical approaches to these issues. I've always really enjoyed this kind of translation, in either direction, between the non-technical, business viewpoint and the technical, IT viewpoint.

The projects I was working on are projected to last until the end of 2004, but the longer it goes on, the longer the project looks like it will last.

Until June 1, 2003:

I was working at the Allegis Group (http://www.allegisgroup.com/), which is an internal IT group to a collection of recruiting and staffing companies. The companies in question collectively recruit for IT, professional, energy and environmental management resources, service resources and administrative ones.

Allegis Group's diverse markets kept it afloat in today's trying times and depressed markets. As of mid-2003 this seemed to be holding true. Allegis Group, like many other companies in this world, is doing its best to stay operational and profitable in difficult times. For as long as I worked for Allegis Group, it remained profitable, but there have also been several RIFs (Reductions In Force - layoffs)I managed to avoid (until the last one in May 2003 - So far, in June 2004, there hasn't been another one, though, which is good news for my friends who still work there).

The job was originally that of Web Architect. I used to work for the Web Solutions group and was responsible to the group, providing research, integration and prototyping for current and future projects.

Since the RIFs and re-org, I became an a systems and enterprise architect. I worked for the Technology Architecture group and I still did research, integration and prototyping, I also researched, compiled, wrote, edited and ushered business cases and other initiatives and strategies through our approvals and implementation processes. Additionally, I was responsible for working with the Analysis group and any project or task team, reviewing designs and requirements documents, researching whatever needed researching and making sure that technical objectives were achieved in the appropriate manner while staying comcplimentary to business goals and direction..

Finally, I was also an arbiter of strategic direction for the company. Along with my team-mates, we made sure that the IT strategy was widely known and universally followed. We did this through meetings, interventions, communication, speaking, e-mails, phone calls, lunches, dinners, whatever the occasion demands.

Well, the reorg in May 2003 went badly for me in terms of staying with Allegis Group. That's fine, though. I can be employed just as well elsewhere, and Allegis Group had good business reasons for carrying out another RIF.