Having weathered the Great Recession so far and being conversant in deploying and maintaining SharePoint-based ECM are not inseparable but they are more than complementary in ways that Microsoft may want to revisit. I say this because a handful of my under-employed KM grunts in arms are peering in behind the cloistered gates of the firewall and they're all thinking the same thing:
(1) What a timely punch an asset of SharePoint-building skills would be to their collective resumes, and,
(2) failing an FTE opening how useful a cloud-sanctioned sandbox would be for adding to their consulting portfolios
From an organizational perspective many of those consulting opportunities lie with startups and bootstrap operations that would rather leverage cloudware than license their applications. Sometimes that means cobbling together a series of wikis with social media platforms. Often it's sharing Google apps and hosting them through Google sites. The great pregnant pause in this experimenting is whether Microsoft will throw a bone at these small scale enterprise dabblers or a legitimate hat in the ring.
That day remains distant. Responding last month to an SIKM post, consultant Don Kildebeck gave a guarded assessment about SharePoint consideration in this segment (RE: Hosted SharePoint vs. Google Sites. Writes Kildebeck:
"Having been involved in the implementation of SP at four different companies (ranging in size from 500 employees to several thousand) I would personally run as fast as I could AWAY from Sharepoint." He goes on: "Basic SharePoint (a.k.a. WSS) is fairly easy and quick to implement. However, it's not long within an organization before people start asking the "can it do this" and "can it do that" questions. And those wishes are almost always based on the need for the heartier and costlier MOSS." He concludes: "The IT time, commitment, and knowledge level necessary to implement MOSS is massive compared to WSS. For a small company it becomes almost impossible to pull off."
Personally I can think of no stronger boot-strap than creating a pilot program outside of a corporate setting for ECM wannabees that leverages the warm fuzz factor of MS office, a dab of calendaring, and some inbound Outlook tenderhooks for reeling in the kind of customary site constructions and rudimentary workflows that currently only happen under contract. Rather than cannibalize their own success, there may well be an onrush of training revenue awaiting MS certification programs that would otherwise remain the sole domain of network administrators and .Net developers.
Besides showcasing the new capabilities, the highly distributed workforces emerging from the wreckage of the last few years may rethink their growth plans around the the stability and familiarity of the desktops that anchored them at their former employers. Insurgent power users could test and sample the look and feel of their own homegrown process designs before offering this evidence up to their own ECM shop stewards. Most significant to Microsoft is that when the economy turns the corner there will be a legion of new users that self-recruited their way from the distant buzz to the front of the 2011 line for long-delayed, now green-lighted projects.
Let them build it, Microsoft. That's the only invitation these folks will need.
#SharePoint