The Case for/against SharePoint
On August 7th, Ashlee Vance of the New York Times published an article, Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession, on how SharePoint is thriving in one of the largest economic depressions since the 1920s.
Reading the comments to the article, I couldn’t help but leave my own on the NYT site. The Microsoft/SharePoint bashing is in full force, especially from those who have never used the platform. What gives here? The denial that SharePoint is a valid platform just because it is made by Microsoft is a constant theme, not only in print, but on twitter on an almost minute-by-minute basis.
Yes, the SharePoint platform definitely has its flaws, glaring ones in fact. But does that make the platform itself useless? I think not, and evidently most major corporations don’t think so either.
What most people don’t realize when they first see or hear about SharePoint is that it is a platform, a foundation, on which to build. The out of the box installation is not the end of the process, but the beginning of a long process of information discovery, starting with Governance and Information Architecture, through… well there really is no “through”, since the discovery and management of information is an ongoing process.
SharePoint is not something that is setup and then walked away from. Sadly, that is what most people think when they come onboard the SharePoint starship: set this sucker up and we can close down our file servers, stream media from in-house, keep everyone informed as to the daily news and be completely synced with our vendors.
“Slow down there, Cowboy. That ain’t going to happen.”
SharePoint is the foundation for collaboration based upon End User ability to contribute and consume information in a structured way. The key word shere are “foundation” and “structured”. The basic out of the box components of SharePoint will get most small to mid-size companies started, but they will typically hit the ceiling of the OOTB solution when it doesn’t exactly fit their needs. I don’t consider this a problem specific to SharePoint, it’s a problem with all generic software.
SharePoint is a platform, a foundation, for managing information in your company. In architectural terms, think of SharePoint as a structure that allows you to live in it while building out the rest of the rooms. Think one, three, five years down the road. What will your “family” need as it is expanding? What customizations will be needed in order for you family to comfortably grow and expand as it is becoming more educated?
SharePoint is a platform. That might be the mantra that keeps this all in perspective.
I end here with one of the comments from the NYT article. Guy Warner, in the comments section of the article, doesn’t play into the argument at all. He makes his point through a wonderful case study on how SharePoint has helped his company with documentation.
This is worth a very careful read, in that Guy, in a few paragraphs, is able to layout an out of the box SharePoint solution for project management.
Quote from New York Times comment section on Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession
Having used Sharepoint 2007 since its inception to organize and use a knowledge base and provide a collaboration platorm for my 20 staff and more than 200 customers and outside strategic partners, I am baffled about all the negative comments (aside from the fact that the article does not present any weaknesses).
Each team member in my company uses MS OneNote for brainstorming where next actions can be flagged as Outlook tasks (the OneNote brainstorming file is attached to the task in Outlook in case it is needed for reference). The next actions can be delegated from Outlook and put on a team members Outlook calendar. All taks and calendars are synched to Sharepoint where a document library of needed references and MS Office templates is available to complete work.
Team members can post issues to a Sharepoint thredded discussion board and can journal their daily “lessons learned” and experiences to a blog. We use a Sharepoint WIKI page to integrate the knowledge we have created with the document library. And here is the most important feature: we can filter any list or document to expose as much or as little of the sharepoint site as we want to for outsiders such as customers or strategic partners. These outsiders can get notices of new email updates to those sites customized to them as frequently as they want.
The bottom line: all our work and knowledge base is self-doucmenting and available to customers and strategic partners. It sure beats trying to keep these same folks updated with email and teleconferences. The biggest frustration with our site was that the site search function was unreliable, but we found out that this pertained to the way our ISP host site installed sharepoint not any inherent flaw.
– Guy Warner
on
Mark,
SharePoint is flawed, in the same manner that a hammer is flawed; if used for tasks for which it is not suited, or by people who have no idea how to use it, it will fail miserably.
The biggest problem with SharePoint may not be that it is sold as a product, but rather that people never learn what kind of product it is. Not just that, but people are more concerned with getting ‘an intranet’ or ‘a project portal’ rather than focusing on what problems they are trying to solve.
If you want a hole in the wall, a hammer may give you that. However, if what you really wanted was to hang a picture on the wall, then the kind of hole a hammer makes may be very wrong.
Users and customers must learn or be taught to define what they want to achieve and not focus on the tools they think they need. We, as ‘experts’ must learn to ask customers the right questions rather than answer ‘SharePoint’ before we know what the customer really wants.
.b
Mark your spot on with your analysis. SharePoint is not the be all and end all of enterprise software, indeed it is in many respects quite hamstrung as a content management platform, and it has many other faults too.
However as you note, it is also an extremely useful platform, but if you don’t have the time or money for useful development efforts, it can still be a worthwhile investment for its Out-of-the-box features, as noted by Guy Warner. It just takes a little planning.
In the end it is the viral, uncontrolled deployments of SharePoint (MOSS) which get it a bad rep, SharePoint deployments rarely fail due to one its technical weaknesses, they fail due to a lack of planning and the inability to properly understand requirements, and then to find a solution to meet those requirements. All too often IT will fob off the business with SharePoint because they already have it, or the business will ask for it (by name) when they should be asking for a solution to problem X.
SharePoint is not stupendously great, but its not evil either. If you screw up a SharePoint deployment, your probably going to screw up deploying an alternative platform too !