Jed Cawthorne on the Ghosts of SharePoint: Past, Present and Future

By Jed Cawthorne (@jedpc) Dec 6, 2010 Comments

1 comment

Whether you love it, or loathe it, you simply can't escape the content management and collaboration behemoth that is Microsoft's SharePoint family. We know the MOSS 2007 incarnation was a huge success for Microsoft based on the massive number of licenses deployed.

Whether you judge it a successful product from an enterprise or users perspective, or not, SharePoint is pretty much an industry unto itself. From local user groups, to international conferences, from books to blogs, not to mention the occasional presentation or article by people like me, SharePoint was every where in 2010. And it will continue to be in 2011.

The Ghost of SharePoint Past

It's not just the loosely bound networking of user groups; there is a massive ecosystem of third party vendors, consultants and Microsoft Partners who work to bring us SharePoint based solutions. As we entered 2010 these groups were already getting agitated, or perhaps excited is a better word, about the latest release. Yes, we had seen Microsoft presentations and maybe even got our grubby little fingers on the Beta, but SharePoint 2010 was coming! Admittedly at the beginning of 2010 we were not exactly sure of the release date, but in some respects that just fed our frenzy.

I was as guilty as anyone, lapping up the official presentations by Microsoft reps at our premises, attending SharePoint Saturday at MS Canada and such stuff. However my attention had an almost laser like focus on how SharePoint 2010 was going to be better than MOSS 2007 in a number of key areas. Why? Well because I was one of the burgeoning group of users who were getting a little fed up with the "idiosyncrasies" of the platform.

Criticism of MOSS 2007 was by no means new in 2010 (the year I mean). It's not really enterprise content management, the WCM is weak, the Records Management is not very good, it's not very 'social' without add ons, etc, etc… We had of course known all this for some years, but it appeared that the hopes for the new version made the critics more vocal, or maybe the less critical just chipped in at this point.

The Ghost of SharePoint Present

Well SharePoint 2010 was released during the year, and we got to read reviews, play with VM's and maybe even get our sleeves rolled up and dove into an upgrade!

The general reception seems to have been very good. The organization I was working for when it was released was no where near ready for an upgrade, and the one I am working for now won't be upgrading for some time either, so my hands on experience is limited.

However the social computing aspects such as activity streams, improved blog and wiki functionality and the ability to stream media have all won plaudits. The ability to share content types across server farms and the new Managed Metadata Service appear to be big improvements. Records Management has been improved too.

Considerable effort has been put into the BI side of things. Although I think the "Business Intelligence for the masses" marketing tag line is no more accurate about SP2010 than "ECM for the masses" was for MOSS 2007. Personally, I see this as improved Portal functionality, the ability to easily build dashboards to display dynamically updated information. The team I currently work with would love to get its hands on this functionality, alas it is not to be, not for a while at least.

This probably applies to a lot of users. It's not easy to upgrade a global portal infrastructure, and of course this does not apply just to SharePoint, it applies to all large enterprise software deployments, be they ERP systems or ECM systems or bespoke line of business apps. So we will be learning the lessons of SP2010 deployments for a while yet…….