Portfolio of Keith ElderRockworld
by Keith Elder
Rockworld
After I launched the new Quicken Loans website in March of 2004, I needed another project. I got assigned to our intranet to fix certain things as I had built a lot of intranets at other companies as a consultant.
I was stationed outside the office of the CIO, Todd Lunsford at the time, and it was late one evening. He walked out of his office, turned to me and asked me to come inside. He had just gotten back from a conference where he had been introduced to SharePoint. A new technology that Microsoft was pushing pretty heavily. He asked me to investigate what I thought about it and then come back in a few days and give him my opinion on it.
I left the office and literally went to my desk, and typed in: "sharepoint sucks" and started reading. For days on end I read articles and tried to explore demos and the features of it.
Three days later I went back into his office and I started to present my findings. It however became instantly clear, Todd had already made up his mind. I didn't even bother presenting my case. He asked me what someone would need to get started using it and I explained it ran on .NET, C#, and SQL Server. No one at the time at the company knew any of those, especially me.
The next day I had a quad core Xeon machine at my desk ready to load Visual Studio and SharePoint and start learning. A few weeks later I was enrolled in a SharePoint course in Denver, CO. Remember, I was hired to write PHP code at the time, so this was all new! Little did I know how much that single moment would shape my future, the company's, and the lives of countless others.
Later that year I launched our new intranet, Rockworld on SharePoint and spent a large portion of the time training others in the company how to use it. The one thing SharePoint did not do well was allow someone to lookup team member information easily. So I built the Roster Search, the first .NET application I had ever written for the launch of intranet. This was 2004. Rockworld stayed this way until 2018 when it was replaced by Igloo, a content management system.
Fun Back Story
After I had a working version of Rockworld on Sharepoint I met with our CEO, Bill Emerson, and our founder, Dan Gilbert, and our CIO, Todd Lunsford, to show them the new intranet. I knew Dan and Bill were sticklers for our culture and "Simplicty is Genius". I tried to head this off by sweating over every name on the site. But, if you know SharePoint, you know it has something called "Team Sites". And that's what I named all of our "Team Sites". Bill questioned it during the meeting but I was prepared. I said, "Bill, where I come from you call things what they are, you can call it a tea pot, but at the end of the day, it is just a kettle.". Bill was satified and we moved on. It was a good laugh.
The last Christmas party I was able to attend in 2018 I ran into Bill Emerson, he's now CEO of BedRock. Guess what he asked me? "Is a kettle still a kettle?". 15 years later, kettles are still kettles Bill.
How it was used
