SharePoint director remains bloodied but unbowed

This week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference [1] in Boston, I met with Christian Finn, director of SharePoint [2], the often-maligned content management tool from Microsoft. For all the criticism, Microsoft claims 100 million licenses, but even if that number is exaggerated, they have a lot of people using the SharePoint product. Finn admits the product isn't perfect, but he believes it stands up, in many instances, to just about anyone out there, and in cases where it doesn't, third party partners fill in the gaps. He used the word "coopetition" a couple of times to describe companies that might compete with SharePoint on some level, yet still provide ways to use their products inside of SharePoint.

Enterprise 2.0

One area that Finn felt pretty good about was the Enterprise 2.0 tools in SharePoint. He says their tools and ability to build profiles are as good as anyone's. In instances like wikis, where it may not have the most advanced features, they have partnered with companies like Confluence [3] to build connectors from their tools to SharePoint. Part of the problem, Finn says, is that the social computing features often get overlooked because so many customers seem to use it as a document management tool (as we wrote about in Survey finds that SharePoint remains a file share for almost half of users [4]). That's part of the reason they had such a big presence at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, to point out that these tools are in their products today.

Document management

When it comes to document management, Finn says they might not have as comprehensive an offering as say EMC Documentum, but what his company does is provide an easy path for people to manage documents. You just right-click, access the document management features and you're on your way. He's not concerned that people consider it a "light weight" or "good enough" offering. "We are not as good as best of breed," he says "but we're OK." He adds that they provide integration to the more comprehensive content management solutions for organizations that require that.

He says ultimately the numbers speak for themselves. "It's a question of positioning," he says. "We have 100 million licenses and 17 thousand enterprise customers. Any vendor can say SharePoint does a lot of things, but not well, but customers are voting with their dollars to deploy it."

eDiscovery

Finn admits that they are lacking in this area, but says channel partners make up for the gap. He also says customers have to be smarter about how they deploy the system, but he knows there are issues in this area. "The whole issue of SharePoint governance is definitely a pain point," he says. "Just because you can set up SharePoint in 20 minutes doesn't mean you should." He agrees there needs to be more thought from customers on how to deploy SharePoint sites, and they have to do a better job to help companies out of the box.

But in the interim, they have set up online resources and free consulting days to work with customers and help them create tools and guidelines to ensure easier governance. One customer for instance, set up a wizard that asks a series of questions about the site's purpose, participants, records retention data and so forth. If a site is dormant for 30 days, they get a warning. After 60 days they get a take down notice. Companies could learn from these types of implementations (but Microsoft also needs to provide tools to make it easier for companies to set up sites in this fashion).

Finn understands that Microsoft is a target, but he defends his product (just as you would expect) and he points out that they were offering MySites, a collaboration environment, in SharePoint 2003 before Facebook even existed, but it didn't get any attention because it was so ahead of its time. Perhaps so, but he's certainly satisfied with his market share and he can always point to that. With that kind of presence, everyone has to take SharePoint seriously, and frankly it would be crazy to ignore it.