After spending last week digging in to SAPs focus on bringing Social Business Design inside the enterprise, I came to the Sharepoint conference to watch Microsoft unveil Sharepoint 2010 and to find out just how social the future of Microsoft might be.
You are probably aware of how big Sharepoint has become (over 100 million seats), and how fast it has grown (the first business inside Microsoft to grow to $1billion, growing 20+% year over year), but one of the unknowns until now has been: Will Sharepoint become a true Social Business platform?
The answer just might be yes, but the key word here is “platform.”
Sharepoint is a product that is truly what you make of it, and has always been more platform than simple product. Companies who invested in proper customization and integration have been able to benefit from it much more than organizations who simply deployed Sharepoint and made it available out of the box.
Sharepoint 2010 is much more usable out of the box. The new ribbon interface is intuitive and familiar to Office users, and the product is much tighter, but the need for customization and integration remains. Luckily, Sharepoint 2010 is more focused than ever on being a platform for developers.
Sharepoint could not have taken a bigger leap towards social computing and collaboration in Sharepoint 2010. In particular there have been major additions which represent the Dynamic Signal (Activity Streams) and Metafilter (Social Tagging) components of our Social Business architecture. Not only are these archetypes strongly reinforced in Sharepoint 2010, but they are readily integrated across a series of products and into ERP suites. I will talk about that more in a series of future posts.
If you have any questions about 2010 you would like me to address in the next few days, leave a comment and I will do my best.
Do you think Sharepoint will be the “secure solution” that Ballmer said CEO’s were waiting for when it comes to social software? Is security really a problem or is it just the feeling of security? My feeling is that it’s more about strategy and training within companies than the actual software.
Still, it looks very promising and might be a great tool to build more social collaboration between employees, customers and partners within a familiar interface.
I drew from Thomas Vander Wal’s thinking earlier this year to offer the following points, among others:
“SharePoint works well for situations in which defined groups need to reach a collaborative understanding of project requirements, their role in achieving those objectives, and what success means for the project. It works less well in providing resources allowing people across the enterprise, and across teams or departments, to discover connections with others and develop social relationships for networking together in ways that meet both personal and organizational challenges.”
I’m going to take a close look at the new version, but I wonder whether you think the 2010 version addresses these challenges effectively?
http://skilfulminds.com/2009/03/18/sharepoint-is-not-enterprise-20-or-social-networking/
I should add that Sharepoint 2010 is not yet available and Microsoft is saying that it will be “available in the first half of 2010″.
Indeed, it has taken a long while for Ray Ozzie and team to replicate and/or integrate some of the features of the “old” Groove.net platform into Sharepoint.
In it’s day, Groove solved some of the biggest challenges facing collaborative technology – security and interoperability. Long before the “cloud” became a reality, Groove enabled users from behind corporate firewalls to leverage a highly secure, peer-to-peer application. Ray Ozzie learned from the experience of Lotus Notes that an intra-enterprise solution that greedily consumes IT resources and bandwidth had a very limited set of prospective customers.
My fear is that the efforts to assure seamless integration with the Microsoft product suite created trade-offs that compromised the elegance (and power) of the Groove platform.
I suppose we’ll soon find out.
You’ve hit the nail on the head about Sharepoint with this line: ‘Companies who invested in proper customization and integration have been able to benefit from it much more than organizations who simply deployed Sharepoint and made it available out of the box.’
That’s so true! I’ve seen and rolled out some amazing customisations of SP even going back to the early versions (before portal). Unfortunately I’ve more recently seen many more companies who’ve invested in it only for usage in their organisation to slow rapidly and who get very little benefit in real business terms. There’s too many consultants offering installations which are barely customised and not realising its potential. The new version does look like an improvement but I do fear this trend will continue.
My application allows people to take content from various sources (blogs, CMSes, RSS feeds, etc) and publish it to any website, regardless of platform & hosting.
We worked on one project with sharepoint so a client could use sharepoint as their website’s CMS.
In the new version, is there any renewed focus on sharepoint as a CMS?
I was also at the conference, and agree there is a lot of functionality in 2010, and a lot to build on. However, I’m curious about your reaction to its lack of backward compatibility, particularly for the development tools, and if you think that will slow down adoption. For example, Microsoft is urging development in the new tools, but they take advantage of features in 2010, which means, as as vendor, they can only be deployed on 2010 sites, which are going to grow slowly. Many large enterprises wouldn’t dream of deploying a new software platform until it has been in the market at least a year, and other people have debugged it.