The SharePoint buzz
The buzz is slowly rising, in preparation for the October SharePoint 2010 conference, and the E2.0 conference somehow amplifies it. I can’t avoid but feeling a little alienated, to say the least, by what I perceive as a gap between reality and FUD.
A quick scan of enterprise feeds is enough to convince us that any company in the Web 2.0 space is about to shut down because of SharePoint’s presumably unstoppable momentum. And yet:
- Half of SharePoint users use it just as a file manager, not surprising, considering that that is the only part of SharePoint that users get for “free” with Windows Server;
- For SharePoint, social enterprise seems to be all about having wikis, blogs and a MySite page for each user (which can be expected to be the focus of SharePoint 2010), whereas most social enterprise leaders like Jive are already moving into what Kathleen Reidy of the 451 group calls “use cases, not tools” which in other words means real solutions for innovation, brand management, customer relationships, and more, as opposed to the possibilities opened by tool kits;
- Talk to any SharePoint implementation partner, and you find that by far most of the money spent in SharePoint projects is going into basic content management functionality, from extending search to be able to manage run amok SharePoint 2003 silos to getting workflow to work, and not into all the things that supposedly make SharePoint so “dangerous for E2.0 vendors”;
- The fact that most crucial business workflows are already managed by incumbent CMS’s like Documentum and IBM FileNet (and woven into it very strong content dependencies) is not frequently discussed, which is dangerous, because the most attractive bells and whistles in SharePoint only shine when SharePoint has omnipotent control of all content.
I suspect that such a gap between reality and KoolAid sweetness will take a few years to settle (Microsoft is putting s lot of fans into creating the dust storm). When that dust settles, I suspect the landscape will look like this:
- A content management layer where SharePoint will coexist tightly with other multiple Content Management silos;
- A basic team collaboration set of services, perhaps complemented with equally basic expertise location and small scale social snippets (and yes, very squarish and SilverLight-ribbon-heavy MySites);
- A thin coat of partner paint, delivering supplementary web parts (the same ones that Microsoft will deliver as “good enough” web parts in the next release) and trying to stay away from the proverbial elephant;
- A thriving layer of social, enterprise 2.0, solution oriented innovators that use all of the above as a source of content to feed interactions, activities, semantic knowledge, innovation management, brand management and many other Enterprise 2.0 functions;
I am sure there will be companies that implement the whole thing using Microsoft’s stack (who doesn’t like to be featured in every Microsoft brochure and presentation, after all?) but the business transformation that Enterprise 2.0 requires will not be built like that: business just can’t wait for Microsoft…
This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 8:42 am and is filed under enterprise collaboration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on June 26, 2009 at 5:11 pm Amy White wrote:
Hi Carlos,
Just read your last two posts that primarily focus on SharePoint. I thought you would want to check out a ‘challenge’ that Box.net is issuing: that it’s easier and faster to use Box.net to share files than SharePoint. You can see more details here: http://www.box.net/simple
We’re launching more than a challenge, though. Our goal is really to increase awareness that collaboration software and platforms should make sharing simple, not complex and overly structured / rigid.
Apart from the challenge, we also have some fun t-shirts to playfully show people that alternatives to SharePoint exist; an animated video that will give you a chuckle; oh, and did I mention there’s also a billboard? https://enterprise.box.net/shared/6d5slclhxr
Please check out the site and Box.net; would love to hear your thoughts / feedback.
Kind regards,
Amy
Box.net
on June 26, 2009 at 8:29 pm Carlos Caballero wrote:
Thanks, Amy. Yes, I know about Box. I have never used it, but I know about the mix of simple collaboration and sharing from a couple of customers who have used/use your product. I also agree that collaboration and sharing should be easy, intuitive and inclusive. The two sides of this dynamic are clear…
I think it was Bohr who, when asked by a young student how could the old physics school so vehemently deny the emerging Quantum Physics, which for “anybody” was so obvious, and what could be done to convince them, answered that (a) it’s very hard to change when you are famous for what you already think, and (b) to not despair, because most of them were old people, and all that was needed was for them to die of old age and then things would change… And they did (I apologize for any licenses I am taking on the real story, recovered from my youth as a physics/math major).
Why the reference? Well, hopefully, the conflict between structured, control-driven and defensive products and unstructured, user-centric and inclusive ones that are bringing most of the innovation into today’s enterprises will be decided somehow outside of the corporate IT environment: companies that take advantage of the transformational capabilities of Web 2.0 innovators will outpace those that don’t. Further, the same IT groups that so intensely devote themselves to the “old generation” and to “follow the pack” are in themselves a dying breed (in relative terms), because they are increasingly less viable, less “competitive” with providers in the SaaS, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 “side” of the industry. “Anybody” who in five minutes gets a box.net share going (actually, it takes much less than that), and starts exploring viable collaboration models in a few more, knows that going to IT and asking for a similarly effective installation of SharePoint (or any other similar medicine), would take longer just waiting on the phone for an answer, and several orders of magnitude more for getting something done, and even more orders of magnitude to get to a resulting business efficiency (if it ever came).
So, let’s hope that the new, more agile business models and the products that support them keep evolving, changing, adapting: dinosaurs are not forever. Cheers