SharePoint Plus

If you've ever sat through a SharePoint Server 2007 presentation, chances are you have seen a slide with a circle divided into six segments. The slide is used to position SharePoint as a platform for six different types of solution: collaboration, portal, search, content management, business processes and business intelligence.

What we are beginning to see from Microsoft are vertical solutions that focus on one segment, with SharePoint providing the base platform and additional products (either Microsoft's, other software vendors or home-brewed code) delivering more advanced features. The image below shows my version of the pie, customising the six segments with some additions:

Looking purely at Microsoft's own products. PerformancePoint Server (including the ProClarity acquisition) expands the business intelligence capabilities. Biztalk Server comes out to play when you want transaction-oriented workflows to automate your business processes. The Groove acquisition, as well as providing Microsoft with a replacement for Bill Gates, complements collaboration by providing offline, synchronisation and cross-firewall capabilities. That space is also crowded by Exchange Server and Office Communications Server offering the required communication elements. If the FAST acquisition does go ahead, then the search segment gets its own toy to play with. I resisted temptation to put Facebook in as a possible future expansion to the portal piece of the pie... ;-) On a serious note, Office Live ought to be in that segment but the strategy remains fuzzy.

At the moment, content management looks the poor relation. Web content management features are hindered by a lack of support for accessibility standards (there is now a free toolkit available for download to assist). The very definition of content management remains fluid (it can span collaboration, electronic documents and records management, as well as web content). And new formats are emerging too that will need consideration - wikis, blogs and social networks. SharePoint has the basics to support them all - version history, workflow, check-in/out, metadata - but there is a lack of information architecture that is crying out to fill the vacant purple slot.

I am often asked how likely it is that an organisation will need additional products or bespoke development to tailor SharePoint for a given project - i.e. does the solution need to be SharePoint + ? It is a simplistic explanation but if you start at the Collaboration segment and work clockwise around the pie, the segments decrease in terms of product maturity and advanced features. Hence, as you work around the pie, the likelihood of requiring bespoke development and/or additional software increases.

Filed under: SharePoint - Overview

Technorati tags: MOSS 2007; SharePoint