Hi folks,
I’m Rick Zeleznik, SharePoint Architect & CEO at Trilogy Solutions.
Simply by the luck of the draw, SharePoint has played a pretty significant role in my life. Over the last 20 years or so, I’ve had the opportunity to help a lot of organizations deploy & use the incredible tools in the SharePoint family. I’ve been truly honored to play my role in helping people connect the dots between technology and their own internal processes & challenges.
In the late 90’s, I found myself involved in a software validation program for the United States Marine Corps, which was an odd hand to be dealt as a motivated Sergeant focused on logistics. The software was geared towards enabling inter-service collaboration during joint deployments, and the idea of collaboration systems in general resonated with me. However crude they may have been at the time, the power was clear and obvious… this was the future.
That experience brought me to the doorstep of the DISA / DARPA Joint Program Office where they were creating a tool called the Defense Collaboration Tool Suite (DCTS), which was based upon SharePoint-predecessor technology called Digital Dashboard. This was a sort of Frankenstein platform that combined what we would recognize today as SharePoint document management with embedded audio/video collaboration functionality supplied by integrated 3rd party conference servers. The idea was to establish a mesh of collaboration services for military leadership using what were (at the time) very crude and functionally limited commercial off-the self (COTS) products.
As new software became available, we evolved the product, leaning on SharePoint Server 2001 and eventually 2003. My role in all of this was to fly all over the place and perform (what we would refer to today as) envisioning, planning & deployment of these SharePoint-based systems. As a newly christened civilian, I saw vastly more deployments than I ever did wearing a uniform. I found myself traveling to nearly every major Combatant Command (CENTCOM, PACOM, SOUTHCOM, SOCOM, STRATCOM, EUCOM, NORTHCOM, etc.) to establish this new capability. As planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom ramped up, my focus shifted towards the Middle East, spending most of my time in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, etc. helping to stand up the collaborative environment that CENTCOM would use to communicate with leaders in Tampa and in the Pentagon as the war unfolded. Once MOSS hit beta, I was already fully entrenched in the world of enterprise collaboration. I was simply in the right place at the right time.
When it came time to design some of the early large rollouts (100k+ users) in 2006, there weren’t many people running around with that sort of experience and I was able to build out the resume pretty quickly. From there, It was a snowball effect, with a string of large enterprise customers, each wanting an architect that had already completed similarly sized deployments.
The “real” world of SharePoint was taking shape and as time went on, it became clear that not only was the collaboration niche worthwhile as consultant, but also that we had enough of a foundation to build a company around it. Together with Jason Guthridge and my brother, Jason Zeleznik, we built Trilogy Solutions into a dedicated SharePoint services firm based out of Washington D.C.
Since 2008, our incredible team has been working with large enterprise customers in the federal, defense and intelligence communities to help them make sense of information as it flows throughout their organizations and the challenges that come with it.
Visit us here: https://www.trilogysolutions.com
Note: if you’re looking for Rick Zeleznik Photography – I’m also over at https://rickzeleznik.com.
