SharePoint for Customer Experience Management, Not So Far Away

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Aug 31, 2011

SharePoint has come along way since SharePoint 2003. Its success has surprised many and frustrated others. But to be successful, you can't remain in one place. And it sounds like Microsoft has some big plans in the works, much related to web content management and customer experience.

SharePoint Success

According to Jared Spataro, Director, SharePoint Product Management at Microsoft Corporation, SharePoint earned the software giant US$ 1.23 billion last year and has achieved double digit growth since then. He says that if SharePoint were a standalone vendor it would be bigger than Salesforce.com.

A few other tidbits: SharePoint has 100% penetration in developed economies and on average 70-80% around the world. It is, without a doubt, the ~~200 lb~~ 24,000 lb elephant in the corner of the room.

But Spataro says people aren't asking what SharePoint is anymore. Now, they are asking "what can I do with it" or "what's the best way to take advantage of it"?

Enter Microsoft's research and a three phase model that shows how SharePoint has been implemented in the enterprise:

Initial deployment
Broad adoption
Business solutions

Phase 1 — Initial deployment — is where you see the penetration numbers coming from mentioned above. In its research, Microsoft found that the bulk of SharePoint 2010 deployments over the last couple of years have focused on team sites and portal sites, with fileshare coming in third. Spataro said that one of the main things they observed is that organizations are focused on specific capabilities and that governance is key for every feature and/or capability implemented.

According to its research, about 80% of organizations will have upgraded to SharePoint 2010 in the next twelve months. It looks like SharePoint 2007 may be on it's way out the door — finally.

Phase 2 — Broad Adoption — is about using SharePoint as the platform it's designed to be. It's about content management, mostly document management, but sometimes web content management. The rich metadata and term store features within SharePoint 2010 are key to this. Also in this phase, organizations are moving from doing just SharePoint governance to the broader Information governance.

Phase 3 — Business Solutions — This, says Sparato is the place many are interested in. But he warns that orgs should do Phase 1 first. This is where you see many partners getting on board, integrating their solutions into the platform and extending SharePoint. But it's also where you see custom solutions created from scratch by development teams, to support specific needs within the organization.

Microsoft plans to spend the next twelve months sharing the message and publishing the technical content needed to support organizations in all of these phases. But they are also heads down thinking about what comes next. And it sounds like customer experience management is a key part of the next phase of SharePoint.

What's Coming Next for SharePoint

I don't have my crystal ball in hand right now, and you know that Spataro wasn't going to give me specifics. But he did tell me a few things:

Microsoft knows Customer Experience is critical and it has been making key investments into the different areas of CXM that will push SharePoint into a leadership position in this area. Here, web content management will play a role.
Microsoft is learning a lot from the FAST acquisition and it will be taking a lot of that into SharePoint.
The focus on SharePoint as a broad platform will not change and Microsoft is committed to growing its business via the fantastic ecosystem that currently supports it.

Web Content Management & the Customer Experience

Spend a little time with Jared Spataro and you will see that Microsoft is serious about using SharePoint for web content management, and they have the clients to prove it. The wssdemo.com website shows you 2,263 public facing websites built on the SharePoint platform, ranging from government to financial to educational sites. The user experience ranges from Flashy to portal like and the functionality varies as well.