New Report Cautions on Using SharePoint for Public Websites

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jun 25, 2008

New research on SharePoint for Public Websites

J. Boye has just produced a new research report on the ever popular Microsoft SharePoint. This report, Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites - A Business Person's Guide, outlines some of the thought processes organizations have gone through when selecting SharePoint for their public facing websites, some project recommendations and dispels some of the often heard arguments for a SharePoint-based solution.

A Report For the Business

The report is for non-technical users and it's not an evaluation of the product in general. It assumes you have already made the decision to go with SharePoint for various reasons and offers some cautionary advice on moving forward.

It's also not a report for an organization implementing an intranet. SharePoint is already well-known as an internal collaboration and document management solution. But it's only slowing gaining speed as an option for public facing websites and that's what this report discusses — SharePoint for public facing websites.

Written by Janus Boye and Dorthe R. Jespersen, the report is 22 pages long — a perfect reading length — and is based on interviews with SharePoint experts, consultants and over 30 organizations in Europe, Asia and North America. It's also important to note that Janus is the lead analyst for CMS Watch's Enterprise Portals Report and a contributing analyst for their SharePoint Report and Web CMS Report. So it's safe to say he has just a little bit of experience in this area.

Some Interesting Findings

SharePoint is Driven from IT

Today, as we all know, SharePoint is one of the most talked about and implemented content management systems with over US$ 1 billion in sales worldwide. But it's only starting to gain momentum as a solution for public facing websites. As this report indicates, many organizations have selected Microsoft as a strategic development platform. This is generally leading IT to view SharePoint as the appropriate and only choice for a CMS solution.

The result is that IT is driving the decision to use SharePoint and not the business, which leads to concerns that SharePoint is not being evaluated against the real business needs. It also leads to concerns that budgets are not developed appropriately and that other options for a CMS are not being considered. All of this of course leads to not planning carefully and most often disappointment as issues with a public facing SharePoint implementation are sure to arise — particularly in the areas of customizations and user interface design.

Arguments for Using SharePoint

Probably one of the most interesting sections in the report deals with the three most common arguments organizations have for implementing SharePoint including:

Synergy with MS Office
Match for current and future requirements
A Safe choice in terms of vendors and product viability

We won't give away the details on how these arguments are dispelled but suffice it to say that organizations do tend to over think some issues and under think others resulting in decisions that are not always the best for their needs.

Using Integration Partners

You'll also read some interesting findings on SharePoint integration partners and their relationship with Microsoft and vice versa. The recommendations is made to have Microsoft play a role in these types of projects because SharePoint is still so relatively new — it's only been out for 18 months — only they have insights that can help with many decisions on approach.