One on One with Arpan Shah of Microsoft Sharepoint

Arpan Shah is a Director on the SharePoint Product Management team. He has more than 10 year's experience in the Internet space. He started with Microsoft back in 2001, leading the Content Management Server (CMS) technical product management effort. Over the last 8 years, he has been involved with subsequent SharePoint releases including SharePoint Server 2007 release. Arpan's team currently leads audience and platform product management for SharePoint. We spoke to Shah about SharePoint's role in many enterprise activities including content management, collaboration and search.

RM: SharePoint is clearly a collaboration tool, but it's increasingly been seen as content management tool as well, at least at the department level. Do you see SharePoint having a significant content management role and how easy or difficult is it to pull different SharePoint installations within the same company and let them communicate in a content ecosystem?

AS: SharePoint provides a rich ECM platform and applications to help customers solve their information management and compliance business problems. SharePoint spans rich document management, records management, business process management and web content management in a seamless way to allow all users in an organization to manage and share their content reliably and securely. Analysts have confirmed that SharePoint is taking this market by storm in democratizing ECM to entire organizations, thereby breaking out of the niche deployments usually associated with traditional ECM solutions. 

Microsoft's leader position in Gartner's 2008 Enterprise Content Management Magic Quadrant report signifies the strides SharePoint Server 2007 is making in the ECM industry. In fact, Microsoft beat out all other vendors for completeness of ECM vision. As a leader in ECM, Microsoft along with several other ECM vendors, announced a jointly developed specification (Content Management Industry Specification (CMIS)) that leverages SOAP, REST and Atom to enable communication with and between ECM systems. This ultimately benefits customers by providing greater flexibility and helping to reduce costs and gain value from existing investments.

RM: Search is a key part of any tool like SharePoint to give users the ability to find content anywhere in the system. How will incorporating Fast into SharePoint (as was announced at Fast Forward 2009) help improve the quality of search for users. Will Fast also search outside SharePoint in other enterprise repositories or even other SharePoint repositories?

AS: Until FAST became a part of Microsoft, organizations were forced to choose between powerful, high-end search technologies or more mainstream, infrastructure solutions. The combination of Microsoft and FAST gives customers a new choice: a single vendor with solutions that span the full range of customer needs. Our commitment to long-term investment in this space will ensure customers will always be able to look to Microsoft for help with their entire enterprise search needs.

At FASTforward'09 [1], we announced FAST Search for SharePoint; a product optimized for enterprise productivity scenarios which will be integrated with the next version of SharePoint Server and will deliver significant out-of-the-box value. ESP for SharePoint is based on the currently available version of FAST ESP and allows qualifying customers to buy high-end search capabilities at favorable terms today while enjoying a defined licensing path to FAST Search for SharePoint at availability.

FAST enables an organization to make all their Enterprise Content--both inside and outside of SharePoint--easily and quickly discoverable from within SharePoint. FAST can index over 400 document formats from a full range of enterprise applications such as SharePoint, Documentum, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, databases like Microsoft SQL, Oracle, DB2, Sybase, MySQL; file system content including preserving the structure of XML, RSS and web content.

FAST is also unique by having the ability to automatically enrich the data by creating metadata where no data existed before.  This metadata then be used to browse content or refine results from a search.  For example, a user can filter a set of results by clicking on navigators like a person's name,  a product name, or a date, based on metadata FAST extracts from the unstructured content.

From a usability perspective, FAST focuses on turning information into business outcomes through engaging experiences. These experiences should be visual to help users to identify patterns and discover new insights, conversational to change and improve how users interact with information, ultimately obtaining better answers faster. Underpinning this, is to help make these results actionable--to turn answers into business outcomes. For example, that might be to create a new PowerPoint deck from existing content that resides in multiple places, or gain immediate market intelligence to avert a wrong decision and save the company millions, or register for a training on a topic he was exploring by featuring query-term triggered content that is not even part of the search results.

RM: How have you incorporated social media tools into SharePoint and what impact do you see social media having on content management and collaboration in general beyond its use in Microsoft products?

AS: In today's globalized, 24/7, always-connected, often-mobile work environment, people struggle to manage all their methods of communicating and collaborating on projects with others. That makes it hard to collaborate effectively. Our approach puts the power in the hands of end users by arming them with the power of the PC, smart software and services to help solve their communication and collaboration challenges. As a result, customers have the flexibility to choose the most appropriate solution for their individual challenges.

With SharePoint, customers get an integrated, flexible set of tools on one platform, all of which are integrated with the Office applications customers are already using and familiar with. SharePoint has helped organizations break down both organization and technology silos by shifting to a standard enterprise-wide platform for information access and sharing. Customers tell us it has been a win-win for them. End users get a connected experience across personal, team and portal sites spanning collaboration, content management, search and BI capabilities. IT gets a common infrastructure they can use to reduce costs through server consolidation, increased governance and faster development of front-ends to existing systems. This lets people work across formal teams and informal social networks inside and outside their companies. In addition, customers also get the power of Web 2.0 capabilities, such as people and expertise search, personal profiles, social networking, wikis, blogs, and support for RSS built into the platform, providing one integrated platform that end users can use easily and developers can extend.

RM: When you announced the Azure platform at the PDC last fall, there was some talk about exposing SharePoint as a service. How do you see companies tying into SharePoint in this fashion and how much computing do you see moving into the cloud as we move forward?

AS: At PDC 2008 [2], as part of the Azure and cloud platform announcements, we emphasized our investment in Microsoft Online Services as a business software offering delivered as a subscription service, hosted by Microsoft and sold with partners. Designed for customers with managed IT needs, the offerings include Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online, Office Live Meeting and Exchange Hosted Services.

We see small and large customers exploring SharePoint Online for a number of reasons. Some customers require collaboration services that are suited to just a few hundred employees and take little IT management; that's where SharePoint Online Standard is a good fit. Some larger companies are interested in having a dedicated environment that can be heavily customized; that's where SharePoint Online Dedicated is a good fit.

Microsoft will continue to innovate and develop products and solutions that adapt to technology trends and meet customer needs. Microsoft Online Services is a prime example of Microsoft's software plus services strategy in action. Microsoft will continue to provide its customers with options in how they manage and access software--whether it's online, on-premises or both.

RM: Governance and security are huge issues for large organizations running multiple SharePoint installations. What tools and techniques do you recommend to customers facing these types of issues?

AS: Any enterprise software development project should be approached with managed planning and deployments. SharePoint is no exception to this and SharePoint installations by default do not allow software developers or end users to upload custom code without oversight by system administrators. In fact, SharePoint is a managed environment that has security and governance features to help organizations plan their SharePoint deployments.  For example, permissions are needed to connect to backend systems, customize sites and to deploy a custom solution.

In an effort to help customers plan for governance and security for their SharePoint deployments, we have published guidance and made tools available through our Governance and Best Practices Resource Centers. We have also been focused on making training and programs more available for our partners and customers [such as] the Sharepoint Governance Resource Center [3].

For more:
Read Shah's blog here [4].

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