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Get the NewsletterForrester: Beware of MOSS Madness?
So MOSS has been attacked for its web content management, lack of social networking features, its blogging and wiki functionality, and its fitness as a public facing Web CMS …hmmm not much else they can go after is there?
Oh yeah…be careful using it as an application development platform — it could wreak havoc in your organization.
The report is called Now Is The Time To Determine SharePoint's Place In Your Application Development Strategy and it comes to us fresh from the analysts at Forrester. They interviewed 13 user and vendor companies and arrived at the conclusion that one must be rather careful when deciding to use MOSS as your application development platform. In fact, maybe this is something to be avoided.
The Problem with SharePoint
In the report, Forrester identifies several areas of concern including: lack of application lifecycle management tools, backup and restoration tools and enterprise data integration. In addition, the report states that SharePoint is a closed environment based solely on the Microsoft server stack not allowing for other databases or non-Microsoft products to be added. Add to that the lack of highly skilled SharePoint developers and there may be cause for concern.
Not everyone agrees, particularly those third-party consultants and vendors who work to integrate or develop SharePoint solutions. In an interview with ChannelWeb, Ken Winell, CEO of Expertcollab, a SharePoint-focused solution provider said, “[SharePoint] has one of the most open frameworks for third party tools and applications that Microsoft has ever delivered. Just take a look at some of the tools from K2.NET, CorasWorks, Knowledgelake, Tsunami. These ISVs are making serious enhancements to the SharePoint platform while maintaining their own identity.”
In Defense of Microsoft
Forrester doesn't spend the entire report beating Microsoft over the head for SharePoint however. They acknowledge that even Microsoft couldn't have predicted how fast and far the MOSS madness would go. And they are working on filling some of the gaps their product has, like the application lifecycle management issue.
Microsoft is indeed a big supporter of partnering to help better their SharePoint platform. We see this in a major way with the social media capabilities. There are also a few providers of SharePoint Administration functionality that even SharePoint doesn't have out of the box.
Three Solutions to Follow
In their report, Forrester suggests their Your Three Strategy Options For SharePoint. We got a line on these strategies from a post on PC World:
- Strategy 1: Use SharePoint as an “application for collaboration and sharing information and not as a development platform at all.” This is probably where a number of organizations sit today.
- Strategy 2: Use SharePoint as “an application and an intranet platform for which the company fills in product gaps.” A bit more challenging an approach that requires the organization to purchase additional third party products or develop custom solutions.
- Strategy 3: Use SharePoint as “both an application and an enterprise portal at the core of a company's application-development strategy.” The most challenging approach and one that requires the IT division to truly get on board with.
MOSS is certainly getting its share of licks these days. Every analyst is evaluating it and coming back with issues and concerns. Most are saying similar things, like SharePoint today is similar to Lotus Notes of yesterday. It's not just the analysts that have negative things to say about the platform. Just create a Google Alert for SharePoint blogs and hear what the developers and IT guys and gals are grumbling about.
But for every person who puts it down, there is one touting its merits. SharePoint is still relatively new and we have so much to learn about it that, yes, we should be careful when developing on it and with how we implement it. The thing is, you could say that about just about every other CMS product out there. You just don't hear the grumbling as loud.
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I'm sorry, but I have to lay down the B.S. Hammer on your article Barb, and tell you that you are misleading the contents of the Forrester report on SharePoint. I've not seen a more slanted piece in a while.
What do you have against M.S.? The proof is in the pudding, so I encourage your readers to read the report, or at least check out the executive summary, which is very positive for SharePoint as both a development tool and as a records and content management engine for the Enterprise.
I've copied the summary of the report on Forrester's web page below. I personally want to see SharePoint become the “form of production” in electronic discovery, bypassing the need altogether in the ridiculous process of “processing” native files into Tifs. Geez. Come on Barb…. Be positive!
What's with all the bad zen here on M.S., and it's #1 software product?
July 16, 2008
Now Is The Time To Determine SharePoint's Place In Your Application Development Strategy
SharePoint Use Is Exploding; How To Get The Most From Its Underlying Platform
by John R. Rymer, Rob Koplowitz
with Matthew Brown, Larry Fulton, Catherine Salzinger
Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)
As application development managers, you may see Microsoft SharePoint as a collaboration application. But as many shops are discovering, SharePoint is also a development platform that people both inside and outside of IT use to create intranets, outward-facing portals, electronic forms, workflows, and even dashboards. The promise of SharePoint: Your organization will be able to create and deploy collaboration applications faster and give businesspeople productive new tools. The pitfalls: SharePoint can add new unplanned demands as your teams fill the product's gaps in application life-cycle management and enterprise integration and as they create policies to prevent a new chaos of user-generated applications. Decide what role SharePoint will play in your application development strategy, and then put in place the resources and practices required to execute on that strategy.
Thanks for the feedback Julie. Oddly enough I thought I covered it fairly. I did note the not so positive and the positive points I had heard about the report. So your disappointment confuses me a bit.
I have nothing against SharePoint - am a SharePoint/ MS architect actually, so I do understand it has it's challenges.
I think it's more amusing in some respects that everyone (analysts and bloggers alike) go after SharePoint so heavily. I think if it wasn't so popular with the masses, you wouldn't see so much about it. I've worked with a few other CMS products that have not been easy to work with. Which makes me curious — what do people think - is SharePoint really that much worse than other CMS products? Or are we just picking on it because it is so much more popular?
I think that being popular does indeed make you a target. At the same time, Sharepoint came from the opposite end of CMS products like Documentum. Sharepoint focused more on web, without the core document management underneath. So what happened is that it created a nice web editing framework, but underneath there is not much there. So it does deserve some criticism. The reason it is popular is that people needed a way to keep track of documents beyond a simple file share. SharePoint solved that problem. It doesn't mean that it got even close to solving it is a sane way.
Personally, I am hoping now that Alfresco has big clients like Adobe, it will continue to gain in popularity. It has the strong base for document management. For the interface, they are building out the Alfresco Share product to compete with the group web features that SharePoint provides. Now that Alfresco can understand the SharePoint Services protocol, it should make it easier for people to use.
It's kind of strange, to me Sharepoint should have been a Wiki engine with a formal doc engine underneath, but they missed the boat on it, and had to add Wiki features inside the framework.
Well 2 years on and I'd have to say the gloss has gone from MOSS ! Pretty obviously MS have pushed yet another half baked product onto the unsuspecting market, full of known problems.
MOSS & SPD are between them so bug ridden that you'd have to wonder if they tested anything at all. Even the service packs have bugs! Gimme a break.
Neither MOSS 2007 nor SPD are fit for purpose and customers should demand their money back.