James Odom

President / Sr. Architect

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SharePoint Avenue is a nationally-recognized leader in delivering collaboration solutions to enterprise clients throughout North America and Europe.

Founded in 1999 as e-Tree Avenue, is a private company founded to work in the web and web design industry. By combining the deep talents of our US and Argentina teams, we provide high-quality services at competitive pricing, yielding tremendous overall value for our clients. A leading national Microsoft Partner and Managed Partner, we have been delivering collaboration solutions throughout North America for over a decade by leveraging Microsoft technologies including SharePoint, Microsoft.NET, SQL Server, Office 365, Reporting Services, ,Performance Point Services, SQL Server  Windows Azure, and others technologies....!

The Role of an Architect
In SharePoint an architect is not necessarily a technical role at all. Many of the greatest architects I’ve known have little or no hands-on technical experience at all. Rather than knowing how to do something, what they know is what is possible and what makes sense.

For this reason, an architect is a horizontal role in that their greatest strength comes from breadth of knowledge rather than depth of expertise. An architect needs to weigh countless options against each other and pick the ones that best solve the requirements.

Architects work on finding out what to do rather than how to do it. They work from a set of requirements or goals and then pick the components required to reach that goal. They work in close company with soft-skill professionals like business analysts, project managers, and so on, but also with technical performers like pure developers and administrators. Once an architect has completed their work, they hand over a design or architecture to technical performers who them implement that design.
An architect needs to be able to construct massively complex grids of capabilities. Every selected feature has both opportunities and challenges, and these need to match, not just to the requirements, but to all other selected features as well. Knowing all the capabilities of all available features and components is in itself a huge challenge, but being able to put them all together to solve the requirements without causing too many side effects is the task of a master.

In short, however, think of architects not as advanced developers or administrators, but rather as breadth-first practitioners within those disciplines, who know a massive amount of topics to only a small extent. This means that there are ‘developer’ discipline architects that essentially architect building and development, and there are ‘administrator’ discipline architects that essentially architect management and operations.

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