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Three months ago I started a new adventure, and so far I’m really happy I did. Turns out I was in a bit of a rut, professionally speaking. I had allowed myself to fit into an operational project management position, and while I can do it, and I can be good at it, I don’t enjoy it. Not to say the team wasn’t awesome, because they were; but I wasn’t the person they needed, and that project wasn’t the right role for me.

So I found myself in a position of opportunity. After five and a half years at Booz Allen Hamilton I went back into the product world — you might say I had a change of conscious (I kid, inside joke. bad inside joke). Seriously though, back into the product world, but with a hint of consulting.

For three months I have been a Strategic Advisor at AvePoint Public Sector, Inc. AvePoint has nearly 50 pieces of software and apps in their suite of tools – and my job, as a strategic advisor, is to help my sales team find the right services to provide our customer. Not product, I’m pre-sales, but not on the product side. Services. The ultimate combination of what I did BEFORE Booz Allen (pre-sales product) with what I did AT Booz Allen (consulting services).

AvePoint’s goal is to increase your company’s investment in SharePoint and the Microsoft stack, because we both know how invested you are in it. Sure, sure, your users aren’t happy with it, but is that because the tool is bad? Statistically speaking, no, that’s not it. It’s because an IT shop sets up SharePoint as a service for their internal business customers but don’t actually do much to help them understand how to use it. We get it, the overhead for supporting complex SharePoint investments isn’t small. Here-in lies our sweet spot, in three pillars:

We help you MIGRATE your content. You’re on an older version of SharePoint and know you need to upgrade for a number of reasons. Or you’re not on SharePoint at all but have determined it’s time to buy into it. Or you’re on SharePoint but need to move a new business segment onto it, or have FINALLY decided it’s time to move off those file shares. We’re there. You’ve heard of this “cloud” thing but aren’t sure how to get there — I hear you.

You want to do it yourself? Our Migration product makes it easier. You don’t have the staff to do it, or you simply believe that the people who wrote the migration software will know how to use it better? Our White Glove Migration Service makes it even easier.

We help you Manage your environment. How many user requests do you get each month? Site provisioning? Permissions management? Taxonomy issues? There’s a thousand and one reasons your users will need your help. Heck, forget your users, there’s a thousand and one things YOU need to do in order to keep your farm healthy. Backup and recovery, reporting, governance … the list goes on.

And we can help you do it. Our software not only helps make it easier, it helps you AUTOMATE it. And our services team helps you get there. We help you implement the technology, and train your staff on it, and help them develop business use cases to make the most out of it. Or, we can do it all for you with onsite full time engineering support and technical account management.

We help Protect it all. I don’t mean permissions management — I mean we do that, sure. I mean really protect. How are you doing regulatory enforcement? How do you validate risk exposure? PII? PHI? SSI? SEC? Proprietary Information? Classified? Records retention? Payment information? Sarbanes Oxley?

That’s right, our software not only helps you handle these things (and way more) but it automates the evaluation of your system, resolution of issues, and reporting. But this is a hugely complex issue – software alone won’t solve it, and our consultants can help you get there.

So this is what I’ve been doing for three months. Learning about our products and case studies, getting to my sales team and our clients, and putting my sales hat back on. And I’m LOVING IT.

So — if you’ve gotten this far — I’m doing what I love. I’m helping organizations identify ways to make the most of their investments. I’m getting to know them, their business, their people, and their road blocks. Then I’m helping them be comfortable with how we can help them. Then I get to hand off these plans to some really smart people so they can implement those plans and make those customers successful.

Can’t wait to see how the rest of my first year goes, but it’s got some serious potential.