SharePoint's Finn relaxed and confident

Last year when I met with Christian Finn, director of SharePoint at Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), he was a bit combative (as I wrote in "SharePoint director remains bloodied by unbowed"). This year, in stark contrast, Finn seemed relaxed and confident and why shouldn't he be? Microsoft recently rolled out SharePoint 2010, a product that at least on the surface answers a lot of the questions and concerns from previous versions, whether that's getting a grip on the sites that are out there, records management or governance.

What's more as Finn told me, Microsoft worked hard to make sure that the pain many companies felt when they upgraded from 2003 to 2007 would not be repeated when upgrading to 2010. As one analyst told me at the event, you can say what you want about SharePoint, and it is certainly not a perfect solution, but Microsoft has been able to package content management in a way that is palatable to the enterprise. They have achieved something that other vendors have not been able to do, and that's mainstream content management tasks.

Finn also gave one of the better vendor keynotes precisely because he understood that the keynote was not a platform to sell his products, but one to discuss broad themes. This was in stark contrast to IBM (NYSE: IBM), which gave a blatant and boring feature dump at Monday's "Evening in the Cloud." Instead, Finn used the example of how Microsoft developed a video blogging platform for the enterprise. Not once did he try to show us SharePoint features, but instead stayed on the higher plane of explaining how they solved a business problem and lessons they learned that could apply to others.

Finn said Microsoft continues to have a significant presence at Enterprise 2.0 because he believes not enough people are aware of the social functions within SharePoint. A 2009 survey, conducted by AIIM and Information Architected, found that almost half the respondents still used SharePoint primarily as file share. (See "Survey finds that SharePoint remains a file share for almost half of users.") However people use it, though, they are definitely using it, and that could explain why Christian Finn is so relaxed this year.

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