Want A Job? Learn SharePoint, Says Gary Blatt

100% of the Federal Government has licenses, but they can't find developers to implement their sites.

Even with an improving economy, there's still a lot of developers out there who are looking for work. And though it may make seasoned Open Source hackers cringe at the thought, one quick way to find employment may be to go over to "the Other Side" and become a Microsoft SharePoint developer. I recently attended the SPTechCon conference, and talked to Gary Blatt, founder and current board member of the Washington D.C. Sharepoint Users Group, about the overwhelming demand for SharePoint-savvy developers, especially in the federal government. We also discussed Vivek Kundra, the new Federal CIO, and the things that Gary likes and dislikes most about SharePoint.

James Turner: For those people who might not be familiar with it, why don't you start by describing exactly what SharePoint is.

Gary Blatt: Sure. At the highest level, Microsoft's vision for SharePoint is as a collaborative tool. That word 'collaboration' means a lot of things to a lot of different people, but at a certain level, it means teams of people, groups of people, more than one, working together, whether they be on office documents or other types of material in a collaborative fashion. SharePoint is also seen as a portal-type application that allows you to bring disparate systems together into a one-stop shop type of environment.

James Turner: Now in D.C., obviously, your biggest customer there is going to be the federal government.

Gary Blatt: Absolutely.

James Turner: I heard you say yesterday that 100 percent of the federal government has SharePoint licenses. Is that through some GSA deal or is it individual purchases?

Gary Blatt: I'm not familiar with the exact details of the sales, but I know that in August of 2007, the figure that was released was 92 percent. And, obviously, it's been almost a couple years since then, so I don't think it was one fell swoop that they did it, all under one GSA contract. But Microsoft sales people, obviously, were pretty proficient in pushing the product out into the federal government space.

James Turner: I also heard you say, though, that only about 30 percent of the agencies are using it. Why do you think that there is a lag in adoption there?

Gary Blatt: A good percentage of that lag in adoption is not for want of wanting to do it. The buzz, quite frankly, is tremendous. I interact with a lot of agencies in addition to the one I might be currently contracting with. And the buzz is, "When can we do SharePoint?" I go to my user group meetings and you meet people from many different federal agencies that are like, "Well, we have the license for SharePoint, but we don't have anybody to execute it for us or help us with it." And that is the prime motivating factor, that there's this huge demand for SharePoint resources and a total lack of supply.

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