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SharePoint director remains bloodied but unbowed

June 25, 2009 — 11:48am ET | By Ron Miller
Tools
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Sharepoint
Microsoft
Enteprise 2.0 Conference
Enterprise 2.0
Christian Finn

This week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, I met with Christian Finn, director of SharePoint, 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 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). 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.

Related Articles:
Survey finds that SharePoint remains a file share for almost half of users
Could SharePoint simply be 'good enough?'
SharePoint still struggling to define itself
Kazeon provides eDiscovery help for SharePoint users

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Comments (6) | Post a comment

Comments

By Kathleen Reidy | Posted 2:07pm | June 25, 2009

Well, not to nitpick, but the MySites idea is more analogous to the MyYahoo concept, which most portal products of that time period (Plumtree, Epicentric et al.) copied. I'm not saying that isn't relevant today, especially since portals seem to be making a comeback, but I'm not sure I'd say it was "ahead of its time" unless we say all those products were.

By Decatec | Posted 2:19pm | June 25, 2009

6 years ago with MySites in Sharepoint 2003 Microsoft was ahead of it's time ...
just as with AJAX when someone coined a better name it became "fashionable"

By rmiller | Posted 4:13pm | June 25, 2009

Hi Kathleen:
Feel free to nitpick. :-)

I'm not familiar enough with the 2003 version of the product to substantiate his claim or not. I'm just writing what he told me. I'll leave it to the experts such as yourself to sort it out and decide if it's valid.

Thanks for reading and leaving a comment.

Ron

By Dan Keldsen | Posted 5:05pm | June 25, 2009

The tagline for SharePoint seems to be, even for those who heartily embrace it, similar to Listerine - "the taste you hate, twice a day."

Folks, NO solution is perfect, not now, not yesterday, not tomorrow. Does SharePoint have weaknesses? Yes. Are people deploying it badly? Yes. Does it have strengths? Yes - among them, it's the single largest environment ever created and distributed for contents, documents and collaboration.

This shouldn't be ignored, indeed, as Ron says, it would be crazy to ignore the MOSS Wave.

No need for anyone else in this space to concede the win to Microsoft, but I will say that the many people I spoke with at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week seemed to be delaying purchases (as business buyers) and also delaying massive improvements (as solution providers) in solutions as everyone waits for the other shoe to drop in SharePoint 2010.

Don't have hard and fast numbers (yet) - but ballpark that sentiment at 60-70% of people I spoke with.

As someone who was around in the very early enterprise portal days (spent 13 years at Delphi Group - we helped coin the term, and had the biggest conferences, seminars and consulting services for a nice long run), it's good to hear that people are rediscovering portals as a way to bust silos, or at least provide SOME layer to unify into a single interface.

Interesting times! Sure to be better the 2nd (or 3rd or in the SharePoint case, 4th) time around.

By rmiller | Posted 8:33pm | June 25, 2009

Hey Dan:
Thanks for the comment. We'll see how it goes with 2010. There seem to be integration issues with SharePoint. Stories I continually hear suggest it does what it does OK, but it's hard to get it bend to your will and that's a problem.

When the guys at Lockheed Martin were presenting the other day, they mentioned they were a SharePoint shop. Andrew McAfee, who was doing an incredible job interviewing them asked how that was going. The two replied that the problem was that their people wanted to customize their social media worlds, to bend it to their will, but SharePoint required them to go through IT and wait. They weren't willing to to do that, so some people didn't come on board as a result.

If one of the central tenets of Enterprise 2.0 is flexibility and the ability to make changes, to mash things together, to produce things in ways the tool developer never imagined, SharePoint is not meeting that standard.

It will probably get you from A to B without too much difficulty, but if you want to move in some other directions, you're going to need help (at least as I've heard) and that's going to continue to be a problem unless it's something Microsoft addresses in 2010.

Ron

By SharePoint Alternative Enthusiast | Posted 4:35pm | June 30, 2009

Finn says "Any vendor can say SharePoint does a lot of things, but not well, but customers are voting with their dollars to deploy it."
Really? That's like a certain foreign president saying "Any country can say I don't do a lot of things well, but my people continue to vote for me." We see how well that's going.
Mr. Finn, it is quite possible the customers do not know all their options and are ill-informed. Few corporate IT departments spend much time searching for an alternative to SharePoint. Most go straight to it as the best-known content management tool. I believe if people start researching their options, comparing and shopping around, they'll find programs with better features, more flexibility, and lower prices.
A very resourceful site that I found helpful is aptly named www.sharepointalternative.com. This is particularly useful for SMBs looking for a robust, inexpensive content management solution.

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