Understanding SharePoint: It's the Ecosystem, Dummy

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jul 8, 2009 Comments

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There are few organizations that haven't considered — and implemented — SharePoint (news, site) in some manner. But as much as it has been implemented, it's still a confusing and often frustrating platform to work with.

Delivering just the kind of help these confused folk need, CMS Watch offers their latest research on SharePoint. The SharePoint Report 2009 helps organizations better understand where and how this platform might best fit in their organization. Here's what you can expect.

The SharePoint Report

This is the second edition of CMS Watch's SharePoint report and likely not the last. When something is so widely used and both loved and hated, you will always find something new to inform enterprises about.

There are nine chapters in this 247 page report and lots of information to digest. If you already have a solid understanding of SharePoint, you might still want to review the first few chapters which cover the basics of the technology along with operations, governance and security information.

Chapter 5 provides some good insight into evaluating, customizing, developing and support SharePoint. Some of the concerns noted in this chapter, such as the lack of good support for developing features, will be resolved in Visual Studio 2010, but until then you are still on your own.

Microsoft has long promoted SharePoint as a platform and has gone a long way towards providing the necessary tools to help developers extend or build upon the SharePoint platform, including new capabilities built into Visual Studio 2008.

Nine Business Services

CMS Watch evaluates SharePoint's ability in nine business services including:

Collaboration
Social Networking
Enterprise Content Management
Web Content Management and Publishing
Portal
Business Intelligence
Forms and Other Processes
Enterprise Search
Application Development

These are the services that Microsoft indicates SharePoint is an appropriate solution for.

Each services is introduced with the listing of the strengths and weaknesses within a SharePoint implementation. They are also evaluated and rated for Enterprise, Departmental and SMB fit, so you get a good idea of whether or not a particular business service works for your level of need.

Interestingly, of the nine services, the most likely fit for SharePoint is for SMB and in some cases, at the Department level. In fact, the only strong fit the report notes for Enterprise level organizations is for Application Development.

The SharePoint Ecosystem

One of the key indicators of SharePoint's strongest capabilities lies within its Ecosystem. The SharePoint Ecosystem is made up of a strong developer community, partners and system integrators who provide services for support and development, custom solutions and integrated add-on solutions that enhance and build upon SharePoint's strengths and weaknesses.

SharePoint Ecosystem

And there are a number of vendors and consultants in this ecosystem. This report gives you a good overview of that ecosystem and what it means for making decisions on how to implement SharePoint.