As a tribute to the 1-year anniversary of the start of the eBay upgrade project, I thought I would share the video I created to show at our celebration party in San Jose. It is a great video, and shows how much fun we had (and you should too) when we did the upgrade. The team deserves a tremendous amout of credit for the work and effort they put in…so here it is:
As a run down, here is what occurs in the video:
- The SharePoint odessey – the 2001 to 2010 evolution. When the monkey discovers the monolith and evolves. Simiarly, eBay's discovery of SharePoint 2010 starts with a monolithic-white board (its only appropriate that we use Richard Struass's Also sprach Zarathustra to show this)
- You see that it really is a love of "SharePoint" that progresses the joining of all parties
- As we drive through the initial requirements (found and un-found), you will realize that this project was done in 3.5 months (when similar quotes were at 14 months at 4x the cost). This drives the selection of Queen's…"Under Pressure"
- At one point you will see Ramin and I on the ground with our hands in the air…it was a fun moment as we were not really knowing what was going to happen…
- You will see photos of our countdown timer of the night we went live (we had an upgrade window of the weekend to finish the upgrade successfully). It slowly winds down until the "GO-NOGO Moment"
- As the pictures are displayed, you will see various moments over the 3.5 months of us working intent-ly getting the job done
- Not everything went as planned and hence you see the "GO-NOGO" which occured at least 4-5 times (some elements include NDR64 discoveries and the infamous Search ResultsProvider that has claimed countless develpers…
- Katy Perry's song of "Firework" is perfect for our dispay of the team members that worked so very hard to make the upgrade happen and thusly are amazingly bright and wonderful people that randomly came together to accomplish something amazing (NOTE: there are moments in the song lyrics that relate to hidden moments)
- Let me be the first to say that eBay has an amazing NetOps team that just kicks butt (Kenny Cheng and Ken MacIntosh), they saved our a$$ a few times…
- You will see a snapshot of a fortune cookie that "I" got…it was the week of the upgrade and it said "Your hard work is about to pay off", it was the best fortune EVER!
- There were some times when we had some pretty "interesting" dinners…hence the snapshot of the menu…
- The video ends with 00:00:00 and pictures of the eBay intranet running SharePoint 2010 and our SharePoint Conference 2011 session – "How eBay successfully upgrade their intranet to 2010"
Enjoy!
Chris