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 !)