Blogs

Well, for the country, but not for most of us. Those of (you) who are on the ECM\ERM side of SharePoint remain at the mercy of the folks in IT, at least from what I can glean from the stream of complaints. Of course, those of (us) in IT are at the mercy of the collective demands of users, combined with budget requirements and the inability of most vendors to give us a roadmap that extends beyond Ohio.

Our favorite form of independence is would be device independence. You know, being able to do whatever we need to do wherever we need to do it on whatever of bit of technology we happen to be carrying. Unfortunately, even SharePoint 2010 still wants to see Internet Explorer on occasion and it seems Microsoft would rather exploit the inabilities of other platforms, as long as doing so would support future sales of their announced but still unavailable device. On the other front in this battle is the not-so-secret weapon known as HTML-5. I have already bored you with my opinion of that, but if you don’t care to re-read that, just know that I’m not a fan of independence by following the path of least resistance. In many ways, HTML-5 seems like life in the US if, instead of fighting, the founding fathers had simply moved to Utah.

The other kind of independence we hope for is the ability to make the choices that support our plans, our budgets, and our workloads. Users don’t want to learn new versions at year-end, quarter-end, month-end or any other recurring end of something. IT doesn’t want to can’t always roll out the next generation of anything due to incompatibility of other software, the inability to meet hardware or operating system demands or the collision between available budgets and revised licensing programs. In the past week, I noticed on Twitter that Flash will no longer be available on Android devices, and jQuery 2.0 (expected in 2013) will drop support for IE 6/7/8. OK, anyone still using IE 6 should be boiled in their own juices, but IE 9 has enough issues that some folks might feel safer sticking with IE 8, or Chrome or Fire… oh, right, browser independence doesn’t exist either.

Independence, like freedom, isn’t free, and isn’t easy. We can chart our own course, but we can’t live like curmudgeons and ignore the world around us. The key to success (as it always has been) is communication and planning. We can’t predict where the industry is going, but we (IT and end-users) can share what we know and plan accordingly. If the vendors conspire to ruin our plans, we can say bad things about them – oh, yeah, we already do that.

If you’re reading this from outside the United States, please understand that since the 4^th of July falls on a Wednesday this year, I don’t actually expect anyone to read this. If you’re in the U.S. and reading this, Happy Independence Day!