Guest Authors: Christian Buckley and Joel Oleson

Back in October at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, the two of us had a conversation about what it means for a product or technology to be a “disruptor” and whether SharePoint (and SharePoint 2010, specifically) fit the criteria. According to the universal source of knowledge and wisdom, Wikipedia, a disruptive technology describes an innovation that “improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers.” Does SharePoint meet that bar?

After posting short articles on both of our blogs, spurring discussions online and offline through Facebook and Twitter, feedback seemed to land fairly evenly across both sides of the argument.

Historically Speaking

The enterprise collaboration platform, as we were reminded by SB Chatterjee via a Facebook conversation, can be traced back through products such as ERoom, Groove, and Lotus Notes, and even further back to knowledge management and project and portfolio management solutions which sought to connect teams and content and workflow. Some of the earliest evolutions happened within the hi-tech and manufacturing space with product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions that connected product management teams and their hardware counterparts through very expensive value-added networks (VANs) using cryptic messaging protocols – all in an effort to tie the manufacturing process to a “single version of the truth” around the Bill of Materials (BOM). These solutions were expensive, highly proprietary, and inflexible.

Then came the wave of web-based solutions. Looking back at the development of portals and knowledge management hubs and the evolution into what we now refer to as Enterprise Content Management (ECM), what is clear is that the ECM battle lines were being drawn into the early part of the decade with various factions of portal solutions, collaboration solutions, and ad hoc team and group solutions.  Then SharePoint entered the stage and asked “Why can’t we do all of these things, but do them cheaper and more efficiently?” SharePoint was really the first mainstream attempt to bring together collaboration, portals, document management, enterprise search, records management, and business intelligence into a single platform – and do it at a price point that not only the Fortune 500 could afford.

While the early versions of SharePoint were far from beating the competition in feature-by-feature comparisons, what it did right was to envision where businesses were really spending their money, and recognize that all of those “expert” solutions were also far from perfect.  They saw that the chain had many strong segments, but the links between many of them were weak. Instead of targeting one of Gartner’s Magic Quadrants, Microsoft decided which ones it would allow partners to stretch it to, and began developing a platform. (Essentially, we’ve seen with each version that sharepoint slowly captures the enterprise backend, acronym after acronym:  “SharePoint 2010 is Poised for Broader Enterprise Adoption” by Gartner – October 19, 2010)

While many of the SharePoint core innards can be traced back to FrontPage Server Extensions (_vit_bin), Site Server (audiences), SQL (SQL Dashboards) and MSSearch (now using FAST), the platform was born in 2001 and has become the fastest revenue generating product in MS history. It has accomplished much in its short ~10 year history, to be sure. With the release of MOSS 2007, a common criticism was that SharePoint was late to the enterprise 2.0 game, but in actuality, Microsoft was very much in the game, developing or adopting the components that would become the SharePoint powerhouse.

The Chicken or the Egg

If we’re looking at things objectively, the SharePoint feature set largely mirrors capabilities offered elsewhere in the market, either piecemeal through consumer-based products or services, or through competitive solutions. For example, knowledge management and product lifecycle management platforms have been around for more than 20 years, there are dozens of blogging and wiki platforms, discussion forums have been around since the BBS days, and even the ability to show online presence has been around in portals and through IM platforms for a good part of the past 15 years. But Microsoft has made improvements to many of these features, bringing them together within a single platform. But does that make SharePoint a disruptor?

While SharePoint is not the first to provide most of what it does, arguably, it does many things better – if not through the individual features, then through its unified platform that made tools previously accessible (for the most part) only to the technical crowd and put them in the hands of the average business user. That’s a fairly compelling argument in favor of SharePoint being a disruptor.

There are a number of exiting advances in SharePoint 2010. For example, the Managed Metadata Service, giving administrators and users the ability to better control metadata and keywords, is a big step forward for the platform. Sandbox Solutions allow you to test out customizations and integrations within a controlled space before unleashing on your entire system. Better integration of the offline Groove story in what is now known as SharePoint Workspace. However, do these features meet the criteria of a disruptor if SharePoint provides a solution for a problem they created through their own design and architecture (an argument that you can make for all three of these)?

But does incremental equal disruption?

SharePoint defined enterprise profiles and personal spaces. From Jeff Teper’s History post on SharePoint “The team proposed we give every user their own personalized site and is still very proud they shipped it in 2003 before there was a MySpace or Facebook.”  SPS 2003 My sites shipping in mid 2003 actually preceded even early myspace.com in Aug 2003.  While myspace has been receding as of late, they did much to help define why we need a personal profile and what it means to create a persona, and, more to the point, why it’s important to be connected.  In the corporate space, it isn’t so much about individual creativity as it is about building the right networks. My Sites are quickly becoming the personal hub for the enterprise, and adoption is sure to grow as the core of the social revolution in SharePoint 2010.  Going back further, the site server profiles and audiences which carried over to SPS 2001 even gave us a glimpse of what would come.

The first enterprise shipping wiki solution was Sharepoint.  Sure. We had Wikipedia and various open source solutions out there, but when you start talking about enterprise muscle, SharePoint was the first to provide any real scale.  How many people know that the Wiki inventor actually worked at Microsoft?  From December 2003 until October 2005, Ward Cunningham (wiki inventor) worked for Microsoft Corporation in the "patterns & practices" group.  Essentially, wikis and blogs were both included in SharePoint 2007, which shipped in November 2006.  If you were to look at the dates on the specs, you’d likely find that this functionality was actually spec’d out in 2004. Using blogs and wikis in the enterprise was not on the minds of many people at that time. Understanding this, it’s much easier to see how Microsoft was able to bring these ad hoc tools into a platform add some serious value, especially when you realize that these components have been in the foundation since the inception of SharePoint, in many cases beating competitors to market.

Making a Case for SharePoint as a Disruptor

SharePoint wasn’t the first in each category it has entered. But the most persuasive argument in favor of SharePoint being a disruptor, in our opinion, is as a comprehensive platform – and all that that enables.

As the platform matures, it increasingly provides tools and features for IT Pros to shape and control deployments. But are these game changers, or simply incremental improvements to meet the changing needs of its user based? Must disruptors drive the market, or can they follow and improve on what the category leaders create?

Within SharePoint 2010, there are a number of strengths which may prove to be disruptors in the marketplace:

1. Business Intelligence. BI is a space that SharePoint has been maneuvering inside and around for the past couple years, working with SQL to bring to fruit true Business Intelligence for the Masses.  The business connectivity in Sharepoint 2010 pointing to SQL, Oracle or essentially any ADO.NET data source or web services integration is huge.  Not only full CRUD, but also offline and rich integration with Office 2010.  Pushing SharePoint Performance Point into SharePoint Server, the rapid rise of Excel Services, and the apparent goal of every finance and cottage IT team in every company running SharePoint to build out real-time dashboard, scorecard, and reporting solutions is a clear indication that SharePoint is lowering the barriers for companies large and small to invest time and money in BI. No longer are these solutions viewed as separate deployments, but integrated into the same platforms as your team sites and My Sites. Going forward, companies will increasingly flip the switch and give more and more access to these powerful solutions that provide rich views of information.
2. Composites. Composite apps are where the rubber meets the road. They give teams the ability to bring together various functions and quickly prototype, build, and release business-critical solutions.  For example, pull together a management solution using Digital Asset Management with enterprise metadata, ratings, built in search, and social tagging.  Or use the streaming video right out of SharePoint with SilverLight web parts to create a YouTube for the enterprise.  While there may seem to be some level of catch up with things like tagging and document ID for records, the activity feeds and social application space in SharePoint 2010 have real potential.  For composites, the only requirement is imagination.
3. Development Platform. With 2010, SharePoint is making huge leaps and bounds into the realm of the developer. Having said that, the majority of .NET developers has yet to embrace SharePoint as the de facto standard for deploying applications in the enterprise.  Is it possible for SharePoint to become the standard?  Definitely.  SharePoint has become key infrastructure in the enterprise.  It may just take a bit more time for IT to realize SharePoint as the application platform, moving from the stigma of a file sharing solution stigma to the platform of choice for developers of business applications.  With the built in features around workflow, security, policies, document sets, scalable lists, and true high-availability support, SharePoint has the opportunity to shake up the datacenter. It is moving from a two-web front-end environment used for simple out of the box collaboration solution to something of a substantial hosting platform for applications, portals, ECM, Search, social, and on and on.  The wave has not crested yet!

So is SharePoint a disruptor? Reviewing any single component as a standalone solution – probably not. But SharePoint as an enterprise platform has become the dominant player, whether in the portal, collaboration, or social media segments. SharePoint is a game-changer, a power-house, and an industry-leader, for sure. In that respect, it’s clearly a disruptor.

What do you think?

Guest Author: Christian Buckley
http://buckleyplanet.net

Christian is a senior product manager at echoTechnology, where he responsible for content, strategy, and evangelism. Prior to echo, Christian worked with Joel at Microsoft in BPOS-D (Business Productivity Online Services-Dedicated). He also led product management and deployment teams in the creation of product lifecycle management and supply chain-integration solutions for some of the world’s largest manufacturing and telecommunications companies, and co-authored 3 books on software configuration management and defect tracking. You can find him at http://buckleyplanet.net or on Twitter at @buckleyplanet

Guest Author: Joel Oleson
http://www.sharepointjoel.com

Joel is Sr. Product Architect and SharePoint Evangelist at Quest Software where he is responsible for product strategy across the SharePoint business unit. As an internationally recognized technology expert in SharePoint, Social Computing, and Internet Technologies, Joel’s writings and extensive public speaking experience across six continents leverage his expertise helping customers and partners. Engagements frequently include keynotes and featured speaker requests at major industry events.

Prior to Quest, Joel worked at Microsoft for seven years, including architect of the first global deployment in Microsoft IT and the launch of SharePoint 2007 in the SharePoint Product team. Please visit Joel’s well-read blog, http://www.sharepointjoel.com or on Twitter at @joeloleson