24-Hour Devathon for a Cause

I am very proud to share that our team at Slalom is taking 24 hours out of this beautiful New England weekend for a SharePoint/Office 365 dev-a-thon to benefit local non profit Junior Achievement of Northern New England.

From www.janewengland.org:

The mission of Junior Achievement (JA) is to inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy. Using hands-on experiences, JA helps to prepare young people for the real world by teaching skills in financial literacy, workforce readiness and entrepreneurship. Junior Achievement trains community volunteers to deliver curricula, and to incorporate the sharing of personal and professional experiences with students. The hallmark of Junior Achievement efforts, these mentors inspire students by transforming the JA lessons into relevant messages that connect what is learned in the classroom to real-world situations.

I am a big fan of this organization. Financial literacy and workforce readiness is very important, with the rise of debt from school loans and credit cards, we have to teach the younger generations more and more about how to best manage their money and be ready to get sustainable jobs. JA reaches 38,000 students in annually!

This weekend a small contingency from Slalom Consulting Boston is putting in 24 hours to create a portal for JA’s board of directors, hosted on Office 365. Some of the key requirements include:

• Calendaring including RSVP.
• Custom newsfeed on the homepage highlighting important details from the portal (not what is followed).
• Branding to match the JA brand.
• Mobile device friendly, with a heavy focus on the iPad.
• And other portal stuff like document libraries,

We are employing our best SharePoint and User Experience architects and developers to accomplish something great. I am really looking forward to working with my team as a whole. As consultants we are all spanned across multiple projects and clients, it’ll be a blast to work with the team, together, busting out a sweet project.

Why do I share this with you? One, to show off how much I love my job. Slalom loves promoting community efforts among its employees, really helping us do what we’re passionate about. #SlalomProud. Secondly, to tell you a little about JA, and hopefully you’ll check them out. They are a great organization, one definitely worth the look.

Finally, I wanted to give you a heads up as we’ll be sharing some of the code we create and walk throughs on what we built. I’m excited to build something great and being able to share it with the SharePoint community.

‘Til then, Happy SharePointing!