More excellent Sharepoint research

Wow, do you think Microsoft ever really thought it, or hoped it would be this disruptive, every where you turn clients are looking at it, or wondering what to do with it once they have it !

Which begets a lot of blogging, comment and serious research. In the later category J.Boye the vendor neutral consulting team out of Aarhus, Denmark have released a nice little piece of research addressing a specific use case: Sharepoint for public web sites.

In my previous employment I have hired Janus Boye and I consider that he really knows his stuff. He is the lead author on the CMS Watch Enteprise Portals report too, but as well as that background expertise, he and his colleague Dorthe Jespersen have interviewed several Sharepoint exerts and consultants, but more importantly 30 organisations in Europe, Asia and North America that are actually using the product. The following is the briefest outline of the table of contents, with major sections on:

• Sharepoint in the organisation
• Why Sharepoint 2007 for public websites ?
• What happens during the project
• What happens after implementation.

Now of course I have read the whole thing from end to end, and would recommend it to you if your looking to employ Sharepoint in this scenario, and if I were to cut and paste the good bits into my blog, Janus would not get your money from buying the report, so I will tease you with a snippet, which personally sums it all up for me, especially in light of a discussions we have with a clients these days. So, from the executive summary:

"Unfortunately many organisations do not carefully consider whether the product is the best match for their web requirements, many not taking the time to review alternatives. There are good reasons for the popularity of Sharepoint, but it is certainly not as safe and risk free as many like to think."

They go onto suggest that Sharepiont is 'consistently evaluated for current and future requirements' as it is not just an automatic fit. This by the way, should be your 'mantra' whatever scenario your thinking of using Sharepoint for.

This echoes my opinion on the subject matter, that there can only ever be 'one ring to role them all' in Middle Earth, not in enteprise IT (and look at the trouble that one caused for hobbits et al) Sharepoint is undoubtedly good for many things in many scenarios, but it is no panacea, and it really should not be treated as an automatic fit for any requirement - do you home work, but don't let Microsoft marketing help you with it. In the words of Run DMC "don't believe the hype"

So, after fitting Sharepoint, Lord of the Rings and rap music into a single posting;

Go here for the report 'Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites - A Business Person's Guide' on the J.Boye website (a snip at a mere 135 Euros !)

More on Sharepoint - updated 23rd June

I am just waiting for an American Idol remake of the soul classic 'War' - lets all sing now "Sharepiont, good god, what is it good for, absolutely nothing, sing it again......."

Of course, thats patently not fair, and Microsofts Sharepoint technologies are good for many things ! However I thought today's posting by Shawn Shell over on CMS Watch was particularily interesting. Shawn is the principal author of CMS Watches 'The Sharepoint Report' - a damn good read by the way, and thoroughly recommended. Toby Ward and I have written an article on the report which is on the Prescient site here.

whats interesting about his post; "Is Sharepoint the end of (portal) history" is the fact that the whole post, which I am not going to repeat or paraphrase here, is focused on Sharepoint as a portal. Now my colleagues and I at Prescient Digital Media, are in the same place as Shawn, who is the owner of his own Sharepoint consultancy Consejo, and the rest of the CMS Watch team, when he says that every which way you turn, clients have already picked the platform. Now I am on the record here as saying that MS should never have dropped the 'P' word from the title to turn it into MOSS, and that actually a portal platform is what MOSS really is, with 'add on' WCM, document management and now lightweight records management too. But once a portal, always a portal...........

However I also agree with Shawn's diagnosis, that even if MS were to give it away (which it almost does depending on your enterprise license agreement), MOSS will never be free, because like all portal frameworks, it needs a lot of work to implement, to get it do exactly what you want it to.

In the end though I can't answer one question - why does the whole world seemed to have rolled over to have its belly tickled ? I expect vendors to fight againts MOSS in their specific target markets, but why aren't more enterprises IT departments looking to alternatives ??

If you have a perspective on this, please do comment.

Updated 23rd of June - please click on comments below to see insightful comments from Martin White and Janus Boye - "I am not worthy" Wayne and Garth might chant........

The right tool for the right (WCMS) job - updated

Updated: Please see click on comments below, where James responds with a very good point

A number of noted experts have started conversations on a similar topic, but from different angles recently; namely how well certain products fit, or could fit, in a web content management scenario.

Dan Keldsen of AIIM, started by asking a question on LinkedIn, ref use of Microsofts MOSS2007 or WSS (i.e. Sharepoint technologies) for external web sites. Although there are definately some good and 'large' sites out there, with many people responding to Dan's question with examples, there are others who note that Sharepoint is a platform, an that said platforms strongest point is not web content management.

In a similar vein Seth Gottlieb noted that the WCM scenario is not Alfresco's strong point, and James Robertson responded with a comment about Alfresco being one of the products with a 'document management' oriented viewpoint, and thats one reason why it may never be great at WCM.

Both Seth and James point to 'integration', so for example on the open source front Alfresco has integrations with Drupal and the Liferay portal, whilst on the MS front, I have recently been researching CMS's vendors who have MOSS or WSS integrations.

So it seems to me, that as is often the case in enterprise software, whilst 'platforms' might be a key piece of infrastructure in your enterprise architecture, you should not attempt to shove that square peg into the round hole just because your 'platform' vendor tells you round holes are a good thing ! Whilst the devil is always in the detail, and in some scenarios there will be benefits to limiting the proliferation of software, quite often it is about finding the right tool to do the right job, and ensure that everything fits together and plays together nicely. Which is a nice way to end with a pointer to Pie's latest piece on ECM standards...........