Blogs

Chris Riley tries to start a conflagration in his latest entry.  It got me thinking about my one of my favorite topics, religious wars and SharePoint.  What I mean is the instant pro and con arguments that come from someone saying that SharePoint is the best way to do something.  SharePoint has armies of consultants, enthusiasts and true believers who are ready to go to war to solve anyone’s problems with SharePoint.  They are ready with case studies of near or distant companies and demonstrations of product capabilities and solutions.  (I attended the SharePoint Saturday event in Washington DC a couple of weeks ago and almost 2000 of these people attended!)  

On the other side are all the people whose lives would be disrupted by these activities.  These might include users of successfully implemented applications in any of the areas where SharePoint offers capabilities, such as portals, content management, web sites, records management, application development, and vertical and horizontal solutions.  (If I have left any users out, raise your hand.)  Additionally, there are ecosystems of vendors and solution providers and IT professionals who have built companies and careers around all of the competing products.  All of them have seen what happened to RIM and Nokia when Apple introduced the iPhone and they want to resist this fate for themselves with SharePoint.  

So the battle is on in this religious war.  What have we learned so far and what should we do?

SharePoint is a platform, SharePoint is incomplete

Elegant SharePoint solutions are being constructed in many organizations.  Some of these target solution areas for which SharePoint is well suited out of the box, such as collaboration or portals.  Others target areas for which SharePoint is not as well suited out of the box, such as enterprise-scale records management.  (I have focused most of my career on Enterprise Content and Records Management, so this where my stories come from.)  Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are rapidly building solutions to fill the gaps in SharePoint, but an organization needs to be able to navigate and manage the extended SharePoint ecosystem to take advantage of these solutions.  I have been in several Fortune 100 organizations lately who say that they are implementing SharePoint for enterprise content and records management, but don’t believe in add-on products because they are waiting for Microsoft to address all of these issues in the next version of SharePoint.  We heard this with MOSS 2007, heard it again with SharePoint 2010, and expect to hear it again with the next few versions of SharePoint too.  The Solution is Coming!  SharePoint has made great strides but competing solutions and add-on products in most of the relevant categories have made progress and have value too.  

Many solutions have significant value, all solutions have a cost

The important first step in implementing a successful solution is to identify and solve a real problem.  In most companies, content in their legacy ECM repositories is the best managed content in the organization.  Content in email repositories and share drives are the worst managed content in the organization.  But religious fervor often targets the legacy ECM repositories.  Frequently, we see establishing content governance and an enterprise lifecycle in SharePoint, share drives and email as a more strategic place to start than trying to convert legacy ECM repositories.  It may be in the future that there is a need for platform consolidation, but it doesn’t always need to be the first step.  There is so much work to be done to build a consistent platform for enterprise content governance, so that we aren’t solving isolated problems with one-off SharePoint sites.  My analogy here is building cathedrals on sand (or in the Cloud).  They look great, but they can create as many problems as they solve.  

Change is good, Disruption is bad

There is great satisfaction in solving problems, and positive change is good.  Too often, in the exuberance of a potential new technology solution, implementers overlook the features of the solution that is being replaced that made it successful.  In those cases, the new solution creates as many problems as it solves.  In SharePoint, this can include performance, scalability, and lack of prior features that were critical.  Not because SharePoint can’t be architected for performance, scalability, and with all the right features, but because these can be expensive to implement and require more planning than the schedule allowed for.  In that regard, SharePoint is no different from prior platforms.  Religious exuberance tends to overlook faults in platforms that can create more disruption in change than the users expected.  Careful planning and expectations management are everything in successful change management. 

This is the same business it has always been: smart people with good tools solving problems.  This process works best when expectations are properly set and managed.  Skills in taxonomy and content management and records management and programming and configuration and testing and project management can be migrated to new platforms, such as SharePoint.  Having all the right skills on the team is the important part.  It isn’t religion.