SharePoint 2010, SharePoint News, Reviews

The story so far…

This is the sixth article in my series exploring The Art of SharePoint Success, a framework I’ve developed to enable organizations to achieve long term business benefits from investments in SharePoint based initiatives. There are four elements to the framework:

1. Governance
2. Strategy
3. Architecture
4. Transition

Last month we wrapped up the discussion on Governance and this month we’re moving onto the second element, Strategy. In the next few articles we’re going to explore the business case for SharePoint, discuss a number of ‘lenses’ which organizations can use to focus their SharePoint strategy, and discuss why you really do need a SharePoint Strategy.

But first…

OpenText announced it has set up a separate business unit for its BPM acquisitions, and the release of a document-sharing product. Mindjet has released a SharePoint connector, Quadrant has announced a partnership and Kofax Capture picks up a document management award. Meanwhile, DocuLex gets health certification for document management.

According to Forrester Research, social computing is one of the primary reasons why SharePoint 2010 adoption has surpassed all goals and predictions, with over 80% adoption in the enterprise (and making solid inroads into the SMB space), much higher than previous versions of SharePoint at this stage of the lifecycle. However, expectations for social tools have also expanded since SP2010's general availability in the spring of 2010.

There has been some recent debate over SharePoint’s utility and ease of use. It’s either an addictive narcotic, or like cod-liver oil, effective at preventing rickets but not enjoyable to deploy or manage. Regardless of what side you take, debating its merits (or not) will only get you so far, and it doesn’t necessarily improve anything. However, MindJet is rising above the madness. It has announced Mindjet Connect SP, which aims to add visual collaboration features and more intuitive document discovery capabilities to enterprise installations of Microsoft SharePoint.

CMSWire recently published a disturbing article, one that equates SharePoint to crack cocaine. The crux of the author's argument is that enterprises, which now use SharePoint, are destined to fall victim to the same problems suffered by heavy users of Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes, namely that what “started out as the next generation of sharing and collaboration technology turned into a loathsome mess that has stuck around in large enterprises without enough commitment to sunset it, despite the earnest pleas of a tortured workforce”.

While the author does make a couple of compelling arguments, he completely misses the point. The point he misses is that no tool, no matter how compelling or feature rich, will fix a broken process. If any organization decides to install Chatter, some fictional future Google Enterprise Suite, or Facebook’s never-going-to-happen SaaS platform without giving thought to the problems of information management, they are doomed to repeat the same exact pattern with ever-evolving user interfaces.

Running in tandem with the release of SharePoint 2010, there are two other elements that, along with SharePoint, point to a more efficient and agile future for management of content. Those two elements are the proliferation of cloud computing possibilities and, combining these two other elements, the development of hybrid online/on premise computing environments.

SharePoint is crack and Microsoft is the pusher. Yeah, I said it. Listen up now, I’ll say it again. SharePoint is crack and Microsoft is the pusher!

The other week, I wrote an article that stirred up a bunch of CMS, DMS, ECMS and other content professionals enough to make them comment. Some agreed, some poked at what they perceived to be holes in my central claim. And a couple took it as an opportunity to express their opinion of how SharePoint is the divine gift to business and IT professionals. It seems like I’ve seen this tableau before, maybe even more than once.

Yesterday we saw in the Forrester Wave for Enterprise CMS Suites 2011 for Q4 that there is a shift in the enterprise CMS market away from the big, lumbering giants of a couple of years ago toward more content-centric apps designed to fulfill a specific business function. Today, we’ll take a look at how some of the major vendors are dealing with this challenge.

Discussion around the evolving role of enterprise CMS and the software that aims to do that are almost a weekly phenomenon. This week’s discussion comes in the shape of the Forrester Wave for ECM Suites for Q4, which highlights a number of issues that we already saw in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for enterprise CMS last week.

There’s quite a lot of interest in SharePoint this week with SharePoint-based compliance from NextDocs, compliance for those who are using SharePoint as an enterprise CMS from HiSoftware and a discussion on SharePoint governance from Symon Garfield. EMC has also upgraded SourceOne e-Discovery Kazeon to v4.6, while Check Point has bought Dynasec.

Use of SharePoint as an enterprise content management platform has reached upward of 70 percent of enterprises, with 70 percent of users and one third of enterprise users operating the system with third-party add-ons. The content compliance issues are huge, which makes the release of HiSoftware’s Security Sheriff SP and the upgrade of its compliance offering timely.

This is the fourth article in a series discussing my Art Of SharePoint Success framework which consists of four key elements: Governance, Strategy, Architecture and Transition. Last month I began to explore the murky, misunderstood, often debated subject of SharePoint Governance by giving my view on what it is, and what it isn’t. This month I’ll be wrapping the Governance discussion by looking at how you actually do it.

This week, IBM’s Domino migrations get easier with the release of DLItools’ Docova v3, Microsoft and Equisys team to integrate Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 with Office 365, Gartner takes a look at enterprise CMS vendors in its Magic Quadrant and ShareMethods upgrades document sharing, while PSIGEN and Nintex partner.

Enterprise software is following the consumer market and is going down a path of increased mobility. As a result, enterprise-focused software solutions need to be able to adapt to provide information at the right time, to mobile devices. This is why H3 Solutions is releasing new capabilities to Mobile Entree that will enable mobile users to see SharePoint performance data and enable HTML5-powered offline-capable mobile app creation.

What's new in the latest release of Mobile Entree? The mobile-focused list includes:

Busy week again in the document management space. This time Fujitsu takes the limelight with its new scanning to iPhone and iPad functionality not to mention Chatter and Google Docs, Nuxeo previewed v5.5, while EntropySoft upgraded Content Hub. Perceptive and AssureSign have also signed a partnership agreement.