SharePoint, Be My Valentine: From a Glorified Network Share to an Enterprise Platform

By Dux Raymond Sy and Mike Taylor (@meetdux) Feb 15, 2010

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How did you celebrate Valentine’s Day? Red roses? Fancy dinner? Perhaps, a romantic movie date? I spent mine with family and SharePoint friends over dim sum (coincidentally it’s also Lunar New Year’s day too!).

As I was reminiscing how the relationship I have with my wife has blossomed through the years, it dawned on me that it mirrors how SharePoint should evolve in enterprises today.

The First Date

I remember asking my wife out for a date to get to know her better. We had lunch at Avra’s in New York City. With SharePoint, IT would typically install it initially as a Proof of Concept (POC) to see the possibilities it can bring with the full knowledge that it might just be a one time, go nowhere endeavor.

Going Steady

After going out for a few more dates, my wife (then girlfriend) and I made the conscious decision to be exclusive to each other. The level of commitment has been elevated.

Your organization feels good enough about SharePoint after the POC and now is ready to use it for a limited audience to validate the benefits it can provide. This is typically known as a pilot deployment.

During this stage, the most common SharePoint application is to improve collaboration and document management practices. Out of the box features like sites, document libraries, meeting workspaces and discussion boards supplement traditional file sharing over email or network shares.

Caught Off Guard

It wasn’t necessarily planned nor expected, but a few months after our first date our relationship moved to the next level. I was always invited to her family’s activities; she got to know and interact with my friends. in short, we became a part of each other’s lives more ways than one. I remember thinking to myself “…this is a good thing! Our relationship is maturing.” Along with this, unspoken expectations grew in ways I never envisioned — more responsibilities eased into the relationship without clearly defining it.

Isn’t this so true with SharePoint? The initial intent of improving traditional collaborative practices for a small group grows into so much more. Your ‘pilot deployment’ magically becomes a ‘production Intranet’; users’ enthusiasm leads to rapid adoption and, typically, proliferation of information silos.

What do you do? What happens when you leave SharePoint as it is and let it grow ‘organically’? What kind of reaction will you get if SharePoint is removed?

Settling Down

After almost a year of dating, my wife and I took the plunge and got married. This is where the rubber meets the road. We could’ve maintained our relationship in a ‘dating mode’, however, we knew that taking the next step will bring lifelong joy and happiness for the both of us. We also knew that it was not going to be a smooth ride, the adjustment to complete commitment can be challenging.

How about you?

Do you find your organization only scratching the surface of SharePoint and not sure how to get to the next level?

Managing the shift from SharePoint as a local application environment to a strategic enterprise platform requires a balance between ensuring business groups can readily leverage SharePoint and ensuring that the resulting SharePoint environment is manageable and effective for the enterprise.

The first step in making the change from SharePoint involvement to commitment is the realization that SharePoint isn’t just another tool in the IT toolbox. It transcends traditional IT tools and is an enterprise platform. It is helpful to restate Microsoft’s simple, yet far reaching definition of SharePoint 2010:

The Business Collaboration Platform for the enterprise and the web

The implications to this are significant. It means that the organization has to have a deep and committed relationship with SharePoint not only in IT, but at all levels of the business.