Intelligent Enterprise

As any product gains in popularity, especially if it's seen as dominant, you tend to see more and more news about alternatives that inevitably get dubbed "killers." The news media and the product's competitors are continually trying to best the dominant solution and predict a product's demise. We can see this clearly with the iPhone and, as Seth Gottlieb points out, "who isn't working on a SharePoint killer?" But in many cases, these "killers" are only hopefuls with virtually no evidence they could harm a fly.

I don't want to suggest that there aren't viable competitors to SharePoint. Far from it. There are a number of very good tools that have similar functionality. However, as a consumer you need to do your homework and ensure that you're choosing the tool for the right reason: it meets your business requirements. This is true whether it's SharePoint or Alfresco (which has also been positioned as a "SharePoint killer").

As many blog posts have noted (including the SharePoint Team Blog), Microsoft has released the "technical preview" of SharePoint 2010. What's significant though is a new graphic (shown below) for the famous six pillars of SharePoint.

Those who have studied physics might be familiar with the "story" of the penny and the train. The story goes that if you place a single penny under each wheel of a train, you'll prevent it from moving forward. Essentially, the collective resistance from each penny prevents the train moving forward because it's the same as having the train try to overcome a single column of pennies equivalent to all of the pennies stacked.

As the SharePoint 2010 release draws near, I can't help but think that perhaps the sheer number of both licensees and add-on solutions collectively represent a penny under each wheel of the SharePoint train. 100+ million licenses and thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) clearly represent a SharePoint strength. In fact, the platform has become so popular that a few colleagues of mine suggested awhile back that perhaps SharePoint had effectively ended the great debate about what portal platform to buy.

I recently offered a session at the J. Boye Philadelphia 09 conference. Speaking in the SharePoint track, I was able to interact with a number of the attendees, getting great insight into SharePoint implementations across very different businesses. Folks from companies like Wyeth, WestJet, and Ikea were either implementing SharePoint or in the early stages of planning for an implementation.

Here's what I heard, directly or indirectly, from the attendees:

Microsoft has recently announced that the new SharePoint version will be called "Microsoft SharePoint 2010." The announcement had lots of other goodies in it, but I was particularly interested in the name change.

Microsoft will often change product names from version to version; clearly to create distinction in the market, but occasionally as the result of moving products from one Microsoft team to another (as happened with SharePoint).

Microsoft recently announced that it is releasing SharePoint Designer (SPD) for free. This announcement has generally be heralded as a positive step: as SharePoint licenses grow, Microsoft can only help itself and its clients by enabling SharePoint customization and usage. However, I've had two conversations with SharePoint customers who are deeply concerned by the announcement. What's more, a company called Portalogiks, maker of a Virtual Training Center for SharePoint, released a newsletter with the title "SharePoint Designer Infection."

The Portalogiks newsletter asked both an implicit and explicit question: what if the average end-user downloads, installs, and begins using SharePoint Designer on their sites? Could this create a mess for the IT departments of these affected companies? The answer is: very probably. The customers I spoke to were nervous even without the benefit of reading any third-party warnings.

In case you didn't read the blog entry about CMIS by Kas Thomas, Microsoft, EMC, and IBM recently announce that they, along with other vendors like Open Text and Alfresco, have submitted a new content integration standard to OASIS. This new standard should enable disparate content management solutions to exchange content in a more standardized way. Presumably, this standard will enable organizations with multiple content repositories manage and present (to various applications) those repositories as a virtual content store. If history is to teach us anything about Microsoft's behavior, it would seem logical that Redmond will likely release a SharePoint "accelerator" to take advantage of this new standard.

The SharePoint IT Pro Documentation Team recently published a blog post on the various Microsoft "enterprise" search technologies. The post did a nice job of clarifying the role of each of Microsoft's various search tools, save FAST (but more on that in a bit). Even the post's author, Kathy Narvaez, admits she has trouble distinguishing the various " ...flavors of Microsoft enterprise search;" Hence the blog post.

Over the last few weeks, I've had the opportunity to speak to various customers about SharePoint licensing. The common theme is that most don't understand Microsoft licensing in general and SharePoint licensing specifically. In fact, most customers are pretty confused by the dizzying array of options, choices, and requirements Microsoft has constructed.

In particular, some customers got a nasty shock when they realized the (potentially expensive) difference between an Enterprise Agreement and an Enterprise License in MOSS.

Through the SharePoint product team's MSDN blog, Microsoft announced that it had released a significant infrastructure update for SharePoint (and related technologies like Project Server that leverages SharePoint components). The update seems to primarily address three areas:

Search functionality and search-related performance (like index performance).

Content Deployment bug fixes (which hopefully will correct a series of irritating bugs related to deploying content from one SharePoint environment to another in web content management scenarios). These are include the hotfix packs Microsoft released for content deployment back in May of this year.

General interface and performance improvements. In reading the three or four pages in Microsoft's site that aimed to describe what was actually included, it was difficult to pinpoint what these "improvements" actual mean to SharePoint administrators. However, Microsoft describes them as "...fixes and product performance updates driven by customer feedback which have resulted in significant platform performance improvements..." Again, I was unable to nail what precisely has changed or how significant the improvements were.

In one of my university political science classes, we had to read and review a now-famous essay by Francis Fukuyama titled "The End of History?" In the essay, Fukuyama argued that the apparent victory of modern liberal democracy over totalitarianism in the aftermath of the Cold War effectively marked the end of the ideological evolution of forms of government.

As I speak with more and more clients, I'm struck by the parallel between the essay's main argument and SharePoint (don't laugh... there's more). In much the same way Fukuyama suggests a resolved debate on forms of effective government, SharePoint seems to have halted virtually every conversation about alternate portal technologies. When speaking with my colleagues, Steve Krol, Exec VP of Services at Lyons Consulting Group, and Tony Byrne, CMS Watch founder, it seems they're seeing much the same thing. In fact, Steve went as far as to compare SharePoint to Kleenex, Band Aid, and Xerox — no one installs "portals" anymore, they install "SharePoint." This begs the question: does SharePoint represent the end-all of portal products?

Microsoft recently announced the latest version of the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (v1.2). This announcement is significant in that, among specific improvements in and to "out-of-the-box" projects, Redmond has added support for Visual Studio 2008. For those of you actively developing on SharePoint, this update to the extensions means, among other things:

While SharePoint 2007's search capabilities have been improved over the 2003 product, it's still not "enterprise class" for a variety of reasons (a point I detail in the CMS Watch SharePoint Report 2008). Clearly Microsoft saw this same shortcoming (both in SharePoint and it's overall search offerings) and announced that they were going to acquire enterprise search vendor FAST Search and Transfer (more information on FAST, see the Enterprise Search Report 2008).

For SharePoint users, this brings up a few opportunities and issues. In a previous blog as CMSWatch.com, I highlighted a FAST presentation that showed nifty new Silverlight-enabled search Web Parts that demonstrate several capabilities that FAST brings to the SharePoint world, including content spotlighting, multimedia search, and taxonomy management.