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…
