Sharepoint: a viewpoint from IT directors

Charles Christian has posted onto  The Orange Rag a summary of a round table discussion between IT directors of Law firms  on SharePoint.  See Charles' post for the full summary, but below I have grouped together some of the points that most interested me:

What is SharePoint?

• Sharepoint is still perceived as all things to all men -what exactly is your firm trying to achieve and do with Sharepoint?
• Microsoft defined SharePoint as an Information Management Platform – it is a toolset with which a firm can create a multitude of applications.

SharePoint's phenomenal growth

• From Microsoft’s perspective Sharepoint is their number one business application in terms of sales, with over 100 million Sharepoint licenses, that’s one in 20 MS licensed PCs in the world using  Sharepoint!

Impact of SharePoint on the vendor market

• Some felt quite strongly that Sharepoint is and will continue to enable them to reduce the number of bespoke and niche applications they need.
  It was generally agreed that the vendors to have/are/will suffer from SharePoint are: 1) Portal vendors 2) Web Content Management solutions 3) Workflow solutions
• One prominent IT Director guaranteed that in 5 years there would be no Document management Systems (DMS) as we know it today instead this would all be done through and using Sharepoint.  Neil Cameron Predicated that fairly soon any enterprise portal/intranet will be run with Sharepoint

I like the point about SharePoint being all things to all men:  it has for example driven a coach and horses through the distinction between an intranets and a document management system.  I worked for one organisation which was rolling out a document management system for colleagues to store their working documents,  whilst replacing its intranet with SharePoint.  Pretty soon they realised that by giving every team the ability to create sites on SharePoint they were in effect rolling out two document management systems at the same time.

Comments

[Simon Carswell]

I hope Sharepoint has improved since I last used it 18 months ago. It suffered from a number of weaknesses, notably:
- too easy to create disconnected 'silo' sites, which were very hard to navigate between
- clunky check-in, check-out, model (contrast this with Google Docs).

It was better than the shared-drives-and-email combo, but not much.