5 Minutes with Share­point Developer Tony Brindle

Tony Brindle has been working with the web-based collaborative platform Sharepoint in various job roles and different industries throughout the whole of his career. Sharepoint was launched in 2001 as a document management and storage system and Tony first got involved in Sharepoint around 2007 when it was used a lot for public facing websites. Later on Tony started working with Sharepoint in-house for companies' Intranets and similar purposes.

Coopers: What do you like about Sharepoint?
Tony Brindle: It's big. I always say you can never know everything about Sharepoint. It's a vast product. It's so big that some people's job only focusses on certain areas of Sharepoint like Search for example or Front-end. I like it because I never get bored working with it, even though I have the same job title, my work changes all the time and I appreciate that variety.

You have been a Sharepoint Expert in different industry fields, at Novartis, Law firms and now at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Do you find your work with Sharepoint differs according to the industry, or is it similar wherever you work?
The product doesn't differ, the people differ. In some companies the people are very resistant to big changes. In other companies like the pharmaceutical industry it's just the opposite, people like change and have lots of ideas about what they want Sharepoint to do. Insurance companies often have the right resources in place, which helps. It depends on who is running the teams and what their initial incentive for implementing Sharepoint was. Sometimes managers have a certain vision for Sharepoint, which is not always possible to implement.

What advice would you give managers who are thinking of implementing Sharepoint?
I always say if you use Sharepoint out of the box, then you're winning. As soon as you start customising it, then the customisation is usually the weak point. Often people want Sharepoint to do certain things that other tools they are using can do, so I customise Sharepoint according to their requirements.

In what way does Sharepoint change the way team collaborate and share documents?
Years ago people used to file their documents in physical folders, later they stored their documents on their personal hard-drives. For the first time with Sharepoint they are collaborating with their team, which means that many people can access and edit a document, which one person has created. So with Sharepoint people's mindset needs to change from "these are my documents" to "this document belongs to the whole team". That is really difficult for many people.
I think the next generation will have fewer problems working with Sharepoint, because they have always been used to sharing information in the digital world and never knew what it meant to work only on their own personal documents.

What Sharepoint feature do you like best?
If I had to pin it down to one thing I would say the Sharepoint Search. It is very powerful.

When you work on a Sharepoint project within a company, what do people not like about the platform? What criticism does Sharepoint get?
People often come to me and simply say "It doesn't work." Funnily enough a lot of the reasons why people don't like Sharepoint initially comes down to styling. They don't like the colors and the look and feel of it.
Also, what often happens is that at the very beginning Sharepoint is implemented as a rushed project, so it doesn't have a good image amongst the people in the team. It's very difficult to change that first impression.

How do you deal with that?
I usually try to fix the things people don't like so they feel more comfortable with it.

Next to your day job as a Sharepoint Developer you and your wife run a dog hotel in the UK. A very different field of work than IT. What exactly does this work entail?
We have a boutique hotel for dogs in Derbyshire. It has six rooms and they are the largest dog hotel rooms in the whole UK. You say it is a different field of work, however as I am passionate about IT, this know-how has filtered into our dog hotel business too.

In what way?
For example, we have installed webcams in each room, so our customers can watch their dogs whilst they are on holiday. This is a service that is much appreciated! Many people literally sit by their hotel pool and put their iPad next to them, so they can see what their dog is doing all day.

At the end of the interview, can we ask you a few unconventional questions, which we ask all our Coopers blog interviewees?
Of course.

Mac or PC?
You need to have the right tool to do the right job. It doesn't always have to be Microsoft, I use many other systems too.

My favourite mobile app is:
Spotify.

Which three things would you take with you to a desert island?
1) Some drinks
2) Music
3) My husky dogs

Complete this sentence please: "I love working in IT because..."
"...it's easy." I really enjoy what I do and have been involved in Sharepoint for so many years, that through my experience I find it easy to do my job. And technology always changes, so I never get bored.

Thank you very much for your time Tony Brindle.