During this period, Francois designed and created the SARS Project Office document governance functions on Sharepoint 2013 and have planned and designed the future Sharepoint environment and migration path.The organization approached Francois for a solution to a common problem being experienced by executives where they are unable to access large documents from anywhere in the world over any device. Francois designed and implemented to company’s first extranet on Sharepoint 2013. He is currently busy finalizing the testing and integration of Symantec for Sharepoint and Tim/Tam on that environment to enhance the security and stability of it to enable SARS to expose some secure sites on that farm to other government departments.Francois is also currently busy planning, designing and building the Sharepoint 2013 environments in preparation for the migration of the internal portal and team workspaces to the new version.

In probably the most interesting period of his career, Francois was asked to migrate the now complex Sharepoint 2007 environment to Sharepoint 2010. The internal Intranet (Portal) was migrated first and the new features of Sharepoint 2010 leveraged for business. This was also the first time SARS used the BI features of Sharepoint, Infopath Forms, Excel Services, etc.After the successful migration of the portal, Francois was moved to IT operations to take on the migration of the now numerous workspaces onto his new scaled out Sharepoint farms.Once completed, Francois was challenged to replace the company’s Internet site with a Sharepoint solution. This was done and a new team in SARS was able to maintain the contents of the corporate website themselves. This implementation required an architecture that would allow corporate documents that are drafted, reviewed, approved and published via the Internal Sharepoint portal, to be published via an orchestration system to the Corporate Internet Sharepoint environment securely and via pre-set governance rules to allow for the automation of links to documents on pages to avoid dead links or out of date content while ensuring governance. The launch of the new corporate website was an enormous success.

Francois was asked to plan design and build a holistic Intranet portal to cater for the needs of the support service departments in the organization and provide staff with a user friendly interface to all the information they need across the board with SharePoint 2007. Francois spearheaded the Sharepoint team and various systems used (Like document management, Content Management, Task Management, Workflow management, etc) in the organization was replaced by this portal. This was the first fully web based solution in the organization that catered for many functions on one platform. Francois also implemented Instant Messaging and Presence information in SARS. Another first.New features meant new capability (like People Search with presence, Syndication, Content Rollup, Customized Alerts, etc) and Francois drove the adoption and support of those.Team based collaboration received the most focus as business was demanded that team workspaces be provisioned for any team who request one. Various guides, manuals, and standards had to be drafted to assist the business units. This meant that Francois not only had to scale his Sharepoint farms, but also carefully manage the support to business with his small team.Documentation written included Functional Specification, Logical Architecture, Physical Architecture, Capacity Planning, Detailed Level Design, Installation & Configuration, DR plan.

With the release of Sharepoint 2003, Francois drove the migration from Sharepoint 2001 to Sharepoint 2003. The new features available created an opportunity to introduce SARS to concepts like Audience based targeting, My Sites and User Profiles and enhanced search. A large focus was placed on digital collaboration giving the organisation its first team based document management and collaboration capabilities albeit at a small scale at mostly a senior management level.

With e-commerce being the big thing in those days, Francois was asked to investigate whether it would be possible to expose some functionality to external entities. Francois designed and built SARS’s first e-commerce applications leveraging the success of the work done for internal applications on IIS-EntireX web applications. These were the first SSL web applications available to the public in the history of SARS.Francois was moved to the newly created Innovations team where he worked on Proof of Concepts for SARS EXCO. One of his challenges was to investigate the use of a WCM system for the organisation. Francois drove the evaluation and testing of various products, and built a new version of the company Intranet on Sharepoint 2001. Francois was moved to an Operational space in the company where he was tasked to manage and maintain the company’s portal full time and the SARS Sharepoint team was born.

Francois was then challenged to create a company’s first Intranet and ensure full adoption by all staff. Him and his team designed and built the intranet from the ground up and ensured that staff were able to not only access important documentation and news, but also seamlessly access the various web systems now starting to flourish in the organisation. He also designed and implemented stylesheet standardisation of all web based systems for all development teams to use ensuring adherence to the CI across the board.After the success of the internal web based systems and the corporate intranet, Francois was tasked to lead, plan, design and build the company’s first internet website. This was done successfully and gave SARS its introduction to the World Wide Web paving the way for e-commerce.

Francois started off by building various fat client applications for SARS on Visual Basic, but it wasn’t long before he was challenged to start working on web based applications. Francois built and maintained the company’s first ASP systems on the Microsoft IIS platform with ADO and SQL, but also integrated into the backend mainframe applications via EntireX. After a few years of SARS successfully using these systems, Francois and his small team later were integral in the up skilling of other Visual basic developers into this platform and SARS standardized on web based interfaces for most of the non-legacy systems.