The undeniable influence of SharePoint 2010

Some people love SharePoint. Some people hate it. But however you feel about it, you can't deny its influence on the market. When SharePoint 2010 was released in the spring, you could hear the bang across the enterprise content management space, yet when it comes to SharePoint 2010 or its predecessors, there is an eerily similar pattern: A large hype cycle followed by the release and the sudden realization that it hasn't quite lived up to the pre-release publicity. To its credit, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has tried to deal with a lot of the issues and problems people complained about in 2007 with the 2010 release, but until we begin to hear actual stories on the ground, it's always hard to separate the hype from reality.

All things to all people

Part of the problem with SharePoint 2010 or any previous release is that it has always tried to be all things, to all people. That means it does a little bit of records management, a little bit of web content management, a little bit of document management and a little bit of collaboration. It's just not clear if it does any of those things really, really well.

In previous versions, we certainly heard a lot people complaining about this. Microsoft has claimed that they heard the complaints and took big steps to improve the product, but it's not easy to produce a product that covers so much ground and still manages to do it in a comprehensive way. That's where the partners come in. 

The partners

Certainly, one of the big strengths of SharePoint is its partner eco-system. The partners fill in the blanks and help compensate for those aforementioned gaps. The partners also help with implementation and deal with specialty pieces that are too specific to include in the main product. Christian Finn, who is the director of SharePoint at Microsoft agreed in an interview with me last year that partners play a key role (see SharePoint director remains bloody but unbowed ). Of course, this year he was more confident in the new release, but the partners definitely still have a large place in Microsoft's SharePoint strategy (see SharePoint's Finn relaxed and confident ).

The competitors

What's funny about this is that while competitors fear Microsoft's influence on the space, they can't escape its vortex. Therefore, even while everyone competes hard against Microsoft, they create products that work with SharePoint because they have to acknowledge it's going to be in place in almost any large enterprise. It's why, for instance, Microsoft had a huge booth at EMC World in May and Open Text has a slew of products that work with SharePoint.

So what's so special about 2010? We are pleased to be offering a new free eBook on the major features of SharePoint 2010 penned by veteran tech journalists Sharon Fisher and Brian Proffitt. Check it out here to learn more about this significant release. - Ron

Download the guide to SharePoint 2010