President Obama Loves SharePoint

What a wild ride this last week has been.  I was scheduled to speak at the SharePoint Conference in Baltimore but had to pull out at the last minute to fly to Seattle and meet with Microsoft. I then flew to D.C. to have lunch at the White House.

Did you know President Obama is a big fan of SharePoint?  Fact: Microsoft SharePoint helped President Obama win the Presidency.  I’ll explain.

My impression of the current administration is that they are shrewd and tech savvy.  I first got wind that President Obama uses SharePoint when he showed up as a customer of Fpweb.net during his nomination for the Democratic Party.  His campaign manager was using one of our small shared WSS v3 plans to coordinate their nationwide campaign teams.

This really didn’t get my attention since he wasn’t listed as a real player yet and we had 3 or 4 other candidates as well from both major parties.  Microsoft SharePoint is a great tool for political candidates.  Out-of-the-box it has everything they need, and the managed hosting model is perfect since they can dial it up or down and turn it off after the election.

But then President Obama won the nomination and you could see the push coming.  I had one of my sales guys call his campaign manager to get him into a more robust plan since I knew he was going to stress test the network with a Presidential campaign.  Poof, he was gone.  Strange.

About two months later, I was covering the Enterprise phone line while the sales team was meeting at lunch and the campaign manager called in.   I signed him up for a middle of the road WSS v3 plan and gave him a significant discount.  I bleed red, white, and blue and will do whatever possible to help our great country.  Again, they were using the portal site to help coordinate their nationwide campaign teams and I could tell from the amount of data and traffic that they were turning up the heat.

We decided not to publicize their usage during the election to limit any online attacks and keep his campaign running as smoothly as possible – this was not a time for distractions.  FYI, we offered our services to the Republican candidate but never heard back from them which struck me as odd because they did use our services up to the party nomination for some of their folks.  Perhaps they took it in house or bagged SharePoint.

After the election, President Obama’s team kept the portal up for a bit and then took it down, I’m sure they archived everything for future use. For those of you who don’t know, SharePoint (WSS and MOSS) is a big piece of our nation’s government.  Local, state and federal agencies have been using it extensively since 2003.  It is now a mandated platform.  At Fpweb.net, we helped the Library of Congress adopt SharePoint back in 2002.  When hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the nation’s largest natural disaster to date, we were called upon by numerous organizations to help get them back on their feet.

Katrina created a real mess and exposed a terrible weakness in our country.  First responders, local, state and federal agencies had (and still do) a difficult time communicating with each other.  Collaboration was almost impossible.  So besides the Radio Interoperability issues, they had no way to easily exchange documents or collaborate online.  Enter Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and SharePoint Portal Server (now MOSS).

Our SharePoint hosting served as instant government, emergency and temporary business sites for groups like Homeland Security, FEMA, Red Cross, Louisiana Judicial System and hundreds of local businesses.  We gave all the services away gratis as these guys had been through the ringer.  It was the least we could do to help them.

I distinctly remember having one conversation with an ex-special forces guy who called in on a Sat phone from New Orleans.  He was contracted by the Army to maintain stability in New Orleans.  Great guy, he had served in the Middle East and said that nothing compared to the devastation he saw on the coast. He was using SharePoint as a project management portal for various teams who were keeping the peace.

There is no question that it took too long to get resources to the coast and coordinate their efforts.  Communication was literally blown away.  Infrastructure was gone.  SharePoint certainly helped but there is more we can do.  Let’s be ready for the next “scorched earth” scenario.

Fpweb.net is in the preliminary stages of working on a solution that includes SharePoint which will make this country able to respond to faster and easier to a national emergency.  President Obama knows that SharePoint technology is such an enabler and I look forward to helping him make this a reality.  We can and will make a difference.