SharePoint still struggling to define itself

While I was at AIIM this week, one of my goals was to get a better understanding of Microsoft SharePoint. It seems to be everywhere, yet has a mixed reputation. To this end, I met with Microsoft's Justin Chandoo who gave me a demo of the software. I have to say, on the face of it, it has a familiar look and feel for Office users. It seemed simple to set up sites and make connections between project calendars and Outlook calendars. You could customize it and for the most part I was impressed.

But I was watching a simple demo--I was not trying to create a site for hundreds or thousands of users. I don't have deal with governance across multiple sites, a problem that Information Architected found many enterprise customers reported having. I didn't have to build complex or lengthy lists of items. As a system grows increasingly complex, as is the case with most enterprise installations, that's where the real test comes in and of course, there was no way for Justin to show that to me in the context of a conference demo.

It's interesting that in today's One on One with Joe Bachana from consulting form DPCI, when I asked him about SharePoint, he had this to say:

"...As far as WCMS capabilities of SharePoint, they are not terrible--the product can be used for that purpose and we have done extensive R&D around this. However, we haven’t gotten a single customer to jump over to using SharePoint as a WCMS. Which is interesting to me, since so many companies own SharePoint enterprise licenses as part of their global agreements with Microsoft. So, go figure!"

So, while I can see why companies might choose SharePoint, especially after this demo, I'm left wondering how well it works in practice. While I'm not in a position to answer that, talks with Bachana and other consultants suggest there are some issues when you start to work with it. But isn't that true of any enterprise software package we cover in this space?

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