The reality of SharePoint deployments

Over at Intranetblog.com Toby has commented on a recent AIIM webinar in a post titled "SharePoint: Truth or fiction"

I am not going to repeat the post here, you can read it yourselves. However Toby notes that the AIIM research suggests the majority of real world SharePoint (MOSS 2007) deployments are at the departmental level for file sharing / collaboration scenarios.

The AIIM research backs up previous CMS Watch comment (and their comprehensive reports) on where SharePoint can find its 'sweet spot'. Most of my previous posts on SharePoint have suggested that its really a portal server / portal development platform with additional features added for collaboration and content management (much like you can buy similar add on's for IBM WebSphere, Oracle Webcentre (ex-BEA Aqualogic) or even the LifeRay OSS portal). I have also suggested that Microsoft are wrong to market SharePoint as an 'Enterprise Content Managment" platform.

However AIIM (or was it Gartner?) did coin the term 'Basic Content Services' to describe SharePoints Microsoft Office centric lightweight document management and library services features, and it appears that this is where many department level deployments are focused - on replacing disorganised and unmanaged 'file share hell' with hopefully better managed and better organised SharePoint document libraries - maybe they are even using metadata ! (sorry lets stick to MS terminology - 'site columns'........)

No doubt AIIM is right that an easy and simple introduction to enterprise information management and ECM via SharePoint based document management is better than nothing, and is a good start to helping organisations build up their information management environment. But Toby points out that the evidence seems to suggest the more 'sophisticated' web content management, records management and even forms management functionality is not seeing much use.

I will just end this post the same way I end all SharePoint posts by stating I am not knocking the product, SharePoint maybe the perfect fit for your organisation in meeting specific requirements. The caveat is that unless you follow the same process you would normally follow for a major enterprise software procurement, and develop a good set of requirements how will you know if SharePoint will meet those requirements, or if you would be better of spending thousands on WordPress or millions on Documentum ? Remember the '5P's' - Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance !

So don't assume that because your IT shared services organisation says you can have it for 'free' that there is not going to be some impact on your bottom line. Indulge in a little prior planning to ensure your solution will at least be 'good enough' even if its not 'the best ever', and as ever Prescient Digital Media stands ready to assist you :-)

Autonomy to swallow up Interwoven... (updated)

..... but will it choke on it ?

Hopefully not.... UPDATE - see this CMSWatch post: What next for Interwoven?

Kas asks some good questions in this post, so I wont regurgitate it here - I note my comments to his posting though - A big part of Autonomy is its Virage 'rich media management' product offerings. To me this would seem to fit very nicely with Interwoven's MediaBin Digital Asset Management (DAM) offering. So if you can manage, and search rich media assets, what else do you need, yep a Web CMS so that you can publish them. So, while agree that Autonomy might not leap right pouring money into updating the rather ancient underpinnings of the Interwoven WCM line, hopefully it will 'do the right thing' and update it as part of a 'full lifecycle' digital asset / rich media product line up - which pretty much answers my own question at the bottom of the original post below - yep Autonomy may well become a fully blow ECM vendor.

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Since I heard about this early this morning, I have been trying to find time to do some analysis and blog on it, but to be honest Alan Pelz-Sharpe pretty much nails it (as per usual) with his commentary over at CMS Watch here: http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1481-Autonomy-acquires-Interwoven---A-first-take

Some others I have chatted with today make the same point as Alan, that Interwoven's TeamSite has always been big in the legal sector, and thats a key 'discovery' market for Autonomy, so in some respects the deal makes sense. However in others it does not; e.g. Autonomy picked up Meridio last year, and there is considerable overlap with between their EDRM facilities and some of the features provided by Interwoven.

Sometimes Autonomy appears to be the British IBM - I am fairly sure it makes more money on its consulting and services revenue stream than it does on the licences for the IDOL platform, indeed Alan characterises it as a 'holding company'.

However with enterprise search, e-discovery, EDRM and now Web Content Management and Digital Asset Management solutions in its pocket, do we reqard Autonomy as one of the main ECM players, challenging EMC, IBM and OpenText ?

For sure it will be interesting to keep an eye on this......

Autonomy press release

Interwoven press release

Alfresco takes on the ECM big boys

Today Alfresco, the open source ECM platform company released what CMS Watch are calling "its most massive product upgrade in the company's history".

You can see the Alfresco press release here

and the CMS Watch article here

So, whats the big deal ? Well if you don't know much about Alfresco, it is a fully open source ECM platform, based on a Java stack and highly standards based / compliant. It's really the only open source alternative if your looking for an ECM 'suite' - that is, a single repository and the ability with the ability to facilitate particular functional areas of content management based on that repository, such as document management or web content management. Alfresco is 'open source' software, which means your freedom is 'free as in speech' not 'free as in beer' - in other words you get the full source code, so it the product does not do something you want it to do, hack it yourself ! Actually 'free as in beer' is available too, as you can download the products for 'try before you buy' prototyping.

Alfresco have a TCO whitepaper and claim (I use that word not because I dispute their figures, but because I am NOT an Alfresco sales person.....) that Alfresco can be much cheaper to deploy than EMC Documentum, OpenText Livelink or MS SharePoint (MOSS 2007), even if you sign up to their subscription model and 'buy' their services. So lets get into this a bit before we examine the new features in the Alfresco 3d Labs release;

There are a number of possible key advantages with an open source ECM platform, and it is a 'platform' just like Documentum for instance, because in most cases your going to do some development on the platform to build the ECM based applications you require, this is not a simple 'out of the box' deployment scenario. So firstly you can indeed 'try before you buy', admittedly this is easier if you have in house Java development skills, but you can download VMWare 'virtual appliances' which make setting up a system a matter of minutes !

The second major element is choice. Do you want to build your Alfresco system on top of Windows or Linux? Do you want to use a proprietary RDBMS like Oracle or SQL Server (if you have spare licenses hanging around) or an open source one like MySQL or PostgreSQL etc - its your choice, your not beholden to any specific platform. Also the heavy emphasis on Java based and other standards means your integration efforts may also be easier. In fact Alfresco jumped straight into the CMIS fray releasing the first CMIS 'implementation' before the new born standard had made it out of the maternity ward !

But lets get round to checking out some of the new features. Very interesting, to me at least, is a full integration with OpenOffice. Alfresco licensed the MS 'sharepoint protocol' so that an Alfresco repository appears like a Sharepoint install to MS Office, so you get the 'seamless user experience'. Well now it appears that we have this for OpenOffice too, with OOo users having direct access to the repository and library services functions (check in/out etc) from within their office application. Yay - full open source document management at the client and server end .....

However possibly a much bigger win for most organisations is a beefing up of the WCM offering. Alfresco has developed its 'Surf' development platform to allow building of web applications using the MVC framework (the Model-View-Controller methodology). However while CMS Watch note that this is still a non-trivial thing for 'business users', it is a framework that can make your 'web heads' more efficient at building AJAX based web apps. Another new feature, Alfresco Web Studio is an attempt to make things even easier, as it is a GUI based, 'drag and drop' end-user site building tool. More so than the other components we will have to wait and see what some hands on user evaluations of this tool decide.

From pure 'web content management' to web based collaboration - the new Share collaboration client. Built on the Surf platform using the Yahoo User Interface library, Alfresco tout this on the product info page as "the open source alternative to Sharepoint" ! Well I can also see echoes of eRoom and even its replacement CentreStage in this product. It provides document sharing, blogs, wikis, calendars, discussion forums and personal 'dashboards' and so it may well provide a focused (and cheaper) alternative - that would please me personally :-)

Finally then, looking at the ECM repository as part of an information management eco-system, it is interesting to note Alfresco's partners and its integrations; we have already mentioned both MS Office and OpenOfficeOrg at the client side, but there are pre-existing or new (CMIS based) integrations with:
Joomla - open source web content management system
MediaWiki- best of breed, open source wiki (the software behind wikipedia)
Moodle - an open source 'Learning Content Management System' for building action learning based web sites
WordPress - the pre-eminent open source blog platform (and lightweight WCMS)
LifeRay - probably the biggest and fastest growing open source portal platform
SugarCRM - Major open source Customer Relationship Management platform

So it would appear to me that using Alfresco as the underlying ECM repository platform, plus its integration with LifeRay or Joomla, with MediaWiki and WordPress, plus the Share collaboration platform or the collaboration tools that come with LifeRay, you could build a pretty sophisticated intranet, and whats more you could build fully functioning prototypes by using the open source downloads without paying a penny for software licences, and beleive me that can save you a lot of money in the longer run !

What's next for SharePoint ?

Hello all

Quite a while since my last post, had a fairly tech free holidays, and then a busy January ! But enought of that......

I note two posts by Mary-Jo Foley over at ZDNet on Microsofts next versio of the office system, Office 14:

Office 14: The (near) silence is deafening &

Select testers get Office 14 Alpha release

No don't expect any details, but Mary-Jo qoutes my friend Janus Boye and some other sources on the timescales for release of the Office 14 system, which includes the next version of SharePoint.

It would appear if a limited, 'private' alpha testing phase is in progress now, by Q2 / Q3 there could be public beta's so would be able to get some idea of what direction Microsoft is taking SharePoint in.

Why is this so important? Well because SharePoint has many users, and it is in my humble opinion (as I have noted previously) a bit of a 'jack of all trades and master of non' - as befits what is basically a .Net portal / development platform. However unless your a lot closer to MS than most of us are (Non-disclosure agreement closeness) then you can't tell where the SharePoint server (MOSS 2007) product is going because there is no public roadmap.

In the first post linked to above, Mary-Jo conjectures that Offline access to SharePoint content will be improved via integration of Groove technologies. This would seem like a logica step, and while many people like to throw brickbats at Lotus Notes, nothing really approaches its Offline sync capabilities after all these years - well except maybe Groove, which was of course invented by the same guy, Ray Ozzie. Synchronised offline access is of course very important to all those laptop (and Netbook) equipped people, who may not be 'road warriors' per se, but are mobile to some extent (think hot desking and divesting expensive corporate property portfolios....).

SharePoint of course has a large and healthy partner / developer eco-system and sometimes MS decides to take a popular feature provided by a partner and add it into the main product. For SharePoint this might include better blog and wiki functionality or better metadata and taxonomy management. Although MS market MOSS 2007 as 'Enteprise Content Management' I don't think we will see much in the way of improved Digital Asset Management facilities, the RDBMS based architecture which requires content items to be kept as 'blobs' in the database is just not scalable for DAM (hence the current 2GB file size limit).

What would I like to see in 'SharePoint the Next Generation' ? Better web content management. Its soooo convoluted, Master Pages, Layout Pages, Themes, over-riding CSS in multiple places, installing the Accessibility Tool Kit - yuck. But again, I think most of this is architectural and not easy to change, so I won't hold my breath. Interoperability via CMIS would be nice and would befit a development platform after all.

In the end I think we will get shiny UI improvements, like AJAX elements etc, but not much of any great substance. I hope I will be pleasently surprised when that public beta finally gets out.