(LAS VEGAS, NV) If there was one, overarching message delivered by CEO Steve Ballmer in his keynote unveiling Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (at the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas): SharePoint is no longer just an intranet solution, it’s been architected for all forms of web scenarios.
“SharePoint is one of my favorite Microsoft products…. It’s true,” says Ballmer. “SharePoint, in my estimation, is kind of magical.I don’t think there’s anything like it in the market. It has become a platform for a whole big set of scenarios that were served by niche (products).”
New scenarios include all of the typical intranet scenarios, but all the Internet scenarios they can attack. To drive the point home, Ballmer cited many companies already using MOSS 2007 for their public website including:
·Kraft Foods (consolidated 200 websites to a single platform saving $2 million per year)
·Volvo (36 languages, 70 countries)
·Pfizer
·Library of Congress
·Hawaiian Airlines
·Kroger
·Conservation International
However, it remains to be seen whether the improvements to MOSS’s web content management will be sufficient to quell the traditional content publishing and management concerns of marketing and communications managers who operate external websites. The new UI for web content management is a marked improvement – in-context editing deploying the ‘ribbon’ UI introduced in Office 2007.
Ballmer announced that MOSS 2010 will public beta test this November (no specific date was delivered). The MS chief also spent a lot of time talking about “the cloud” and was even so bold as to state that “SharePoint is in the center of the cloud.”
“It’s all in the cloud–we certainly agree with that,” said Ballmer, who stressed that SharePoint Online has more than 1 million online users (and 7,000 partners). “SharePoint is more capable, more extensible, more Internet & cloud focused. It’s an amazing product.”
NEW FEATURES / TOOLS:
·“Ribbon” interface (in-context editing)
·"Visual web parts” (“no more hard-coding of web parts”)
·Supports development / design on Vista & Windows 7
·Access services (publish Access dbases through SP)
·New sandboxed solutions
·Integrated rich media & Silverlight
·Improved Visual Studio & SQL
·Upgrades from 2007 will include a complete migration of an existing home page design / UI to 2010
·Improved social computing (blogs, wikis, tagging, ratings, etc)
·Improved search algorithms and FAST Search integration
·New site scenarios for:
oPricing analysis
oHiring processes
oCitizen management (citizen portals)
oProject tracking
oSales reporting
oConference planning
oDelivery scheduling
oCompliance review sites
SOCIAL COMPUTING
“We needed to facilitate this next generation of social computing,” stated Ballmer, though not convincingly, when asked about the improvements on social media – a notorious weakness of the MOSS 2007 platform. “We’ve done this with My Sites, mashing-up, etc. I think we’ve moved towards 3.0.”
Improvements to the highly criticized social computing of MOSS include:
Better blogs, wikis, calendars
Co-authoring
Content tagging
Tag clouds
Ratings
Bookmarks
MySites “Smart Profiles” and feeds
Browse colleagues and experts
“Share This Site.”
“There isn’t an enterprise on the planet that doesn’t want to embrace social computing, but they worry about how to do it,” explained Ballmer. “If we can show a path to CEOs and CIOs that we can let people interact with each other the way they want to (and still protect privacy and security) then they will embrace social computing.”
CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Improvements to ECM include:
·Document management: The ceiling limit on a document library moves to 10 million, and within a site collection, to hundreds of millions of documents; no longer will you have to right click to bring up the actions / options of a document, the ribbon hosts all of the options / actions the user needs
·Taxonomy management: you will be able to have consistent content types taxonomy across server farms (applied at the document level)
·Pictures: photos no longer have to be in an SP library, but can be uploaded from your hard drive
·The addition of true Digital Asset Management
GOVERNANCE
Perhaps the biggest criticism or flaw of SharePoint has been the issue of governance, which Microsoft has only addressed half-heartedly, as reflected in Tom Rizzo’s comments: “There’s a lot we’re doing on governance, but its only 20% software, and 80% process,” says Rizzo, Senior Director, SharePoint. “We’ve invested a lot in best practices, centers of excellence. We’ll continue to invest, but I think we’re still need near the beginning, than the end.” In other words, governance is more the client’s responsibility than Microsoft’s.
SHAREPOINT CONFERENCE STATISTICS:
·7.5 miles of network cable
·7,400 participants (up from 3,800) – 94% growth
·297 world class speakers
·70 countries
·165 sponsors
·300+ hours
·240 sessions
·45+ hours of hands-on labas
·18 customer sessions (Delloite)
·2 SharePoint marriages
·Biggest Beach Party ever by Mandalay with Huey Lewis & The News
You’ve
probably seen the term, or heard it bantered about by geeks, or maybe your head
is in it… but you may not fully understand the term “cloud” or “SasS” (software
as a service) or perhaps just think its another catchy marketing acronym like
MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server).
The “cloud”
refers to cloud computing that at the risk of over-simplifying is simply
hosting – computer, server, software, and other hardware and infrastructure
hosting. You’re already a cloud customer, probably many times over (someone is
hosting your email, website, blog, etc. In fact, 56% of internet users use
webmail services such as Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail – hosted email in the cloud).
In short,
hosting is provided as a service over the Internet. SaaS is simply hosted
software that could include your website content management system, search
engine, CRM (Salesforce.com), etc. The cloud is merely a metaphor based loosely
on those computer network diagrams that so cleverly depict little computers
with wires running between each other, servers, firewalls, etc.
I was
recently pressed on the subject of a “hosted intranet” and why an organization
shouldn’t outsource their intranet to “the cloud.” God forbid we let
professionals who know what they’re doing maintain our second-rate,
after-though, cost-center of an intranet!
It is
baffling to me that the intranet isn’t hosted externally for more organizations.
Well, I’m well versed with clueless executives with knee-jerk reactions around “security”,
privacy, and “the way things have always been done” but I guess I’m naïve to
have faith that more would start to embrace the 21st century. If these dolts
can Facebook then surely there’s hope, right?
The
biggest obstacle blocking the migration of more intranets to the cloud is
culture and fear of the ‘unknown’. If the host has proper security does it
matter if it’s hosted elsewhere? We do our banking online now – we can’t access
the intranet over the Internet?! Most of our benefits and compensation systems
are now hosted elsewhere in the cloud – we’re talking about people’s pay,
insurance and benefits!
In fact, if
it costs me less money and I don't have to worry about the maintenance then you
better believe I choose hosted – and I have told clients the same. Its one of
the reasons the "cloud" is expanding so fast. It would be 10 times
the size if people would just get beyond the knee-jerk reaction to have
everything in-house where it costs more, and probably enjoys less security than
the top of the line that many hosts employ.
The
downside to avoiding the cloud can be far more expensive: I have one client (identity
protected) who spent well more than $1 million on a new intranet design and
platform and it crashed in the first few minutes, never to go live again
because the organization didn’t have the proper infrastructure. One-and-one-half
years later, the intranet is still not live. This would never have happened had
it been turned over to a host. Instead, millions of dollars have been lost, and
countless thousands of employee hours.
Has your
organization embraced the cloud, or are you wasting valuable time and skills on
hosting and maintenance?
--
NEXT
WEBINAR:
What do
the best intranets look like? What are the best practices and principles for
redesigning an intranet? Having designed and re-designed dozens of intranet
sites (and websites), Prescient Digital Media’s Toby Ward and Catherine Elder
will draw on their experiences to provide best practices in approaching
intranet design.
Like
anything, you get what you pay for. However, that doesn't mean a
social media or Intranet 2.0 solution can't be an inexpensive
solution, but it does require proper planning & governance, and
usually some customization.
According
to the results of the
Intranet
2.0 Global Survey
(561 organizations of all sizes from across the planet), 46% of those
with 2.0 tools have spent nothing or very little on the solution:
46%
have spent $10,000 or less
35%
have spent between $10,000 and $100,00; 19% have spent $100,000 or
more
It
should probably come as no surprise then that satisfaction levels
with 2.0 tools is also quite low:
Satisfaction
rates with executives is dangerously poor: 38% of executives rate
the 2.0 tools as poor or very poor; a lowly 23% rate them as good or
very good
Employee
satisfaction is almost poor: 35% of organizations say employee
satisfaction with the 2.0 tools is poor or very poor; only 27% rate
the tools as good or very good
Only
29% of organizations rate the tool functionality as good or very
good; 24% rate them as poor or very poor
In
short, organizations are spending very little on their 2.0
initiatives, and the satisfaction levels are correspondingly low.
Investment doesn't necessarily deliver satisfaction, but a look into
the technologies used reveals some further insight. The vast majority
of organizations with 2.0 tools use free, open source solutions or
those bundled with a platform solution like SharePoint:
48%
of organizations use SharePoint
20%
of organizations use Facebook
17%
of organizations use MediaWiki
16%
of organizations use WordPress
There
isn't a single, dedicated 2.0 licensed solution used by more than 13%
of organizations. The vast majority use free, open source with the
exception of SharePoint which sports 2.0 tools that leave very little
to be desired (although the social media components in SharePoint
2010 are supposed to be spectacular, and represent a heavy portion of
the investment in the SharePoint upgrade).
Two
lessons are worth noting:
1
- Vanilla solutions will deliver vanilla results (without
customization tailored to the target audience.
2 -
Change management is tantamount to success. These tools require
promotion, education, and communications. If you build it they will
not come necessarily, employees need to be instructed accordingly.
The
findings of the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey are highlighted in the
report "Intranet 2.0: social media becomes mainstream on the
corporate intranet."
To
download a free, summarized version of the Intranet 2.0 report please
visit:
Like
the content of your website or intranet, planning and governance is
technology agnostic; whether its SharePoint or another portal or
content management platform, the necessity for and the approach to
governance is the same. Given its technology neutral status in the
realm of website and intranet evolution this module on planning and
governance is largely applicable to any technology platform and as
such is generic to start.
While
generic in nature, there are some components of SharePoint that
require specific consideration, and are discussed and addressed by
the interviewed subject matter experts and the included case studies
(see Planning
for SharePoint Success).
“Without
proper architecture and governance, I can guarantee you that
SharePoint will fail,” says Bob Mixon, President of Mixon
Consulting,
addressing the annual Enterprise 3 conference in San Diego.
In
particular, the powerful Team Site features and easy deployment
features (Site Collections) of SharePoint make it even more demanding
of a rigorous plan and detailed governance model. While
intranet governance provides clarity and rules: namely the titles,
roles and responsibilities of its owners, managers, stakeholders and
contributors.
Sadly,
very few organizations actually have a well-defined governance model,
and many of those have spent hundreds-of-thousands to millions of
dollars on their website or intranet – amounting to extraordinary
investments left to chance and execution on a whim.
only
47% of organizations have a defined governance model (32% have 6,000
employees or more; 11% have 30,000 employees or more);
of
the tools and platforms being used by survey participants, a
whopping 47% are using SharePoint (MOSS 2007) in some shape or form.
Intranet
Sprawl
As IP
technology has advanced corporate intranets have become more complex
and interactive including human resource and purchasing applications,
collaboration tools, business intelligence and real-time reporting
tools. Some organizations without intranet governance and enterprise
standards (for web page and content creation) have seen the birth of
individual intranets for every department and work team.
“Do-what-you-like” was the only rule and the corporate network
became the wild west or ‘intranet sprawl’.
'Intranet
sprawl' can be a poisonous side-effect of SharePoint Team Site and
site collection use without the proper “rules” for deploying and
managing sites. However, its not merely a SharePoint problem. At one
point at the turn of the millennium, IBM's network was choked with
approximately 10,000 intranet sites before they undertook a
governance process and federation (consolidation campaign) that saved
the company untold millions (IBM claims its saved more than a $1
billion).
Perhaps
more so than most, SharePoint (MOSS 2007 or WSS) requires a
governance model. I categorize intranet governance by four broad
approaches or models:
Decentralized
(no single owner; do-what-you-like)
Centralized
a single owner or department controls it all; highly bureaucratic;
common in small organizations)
Collaborative
(shared ownership via committee)
Hybrid,
centralized
(single owner, with collaborative accountability, decentralized
content ownership)
Learn
more about planning and governance for the corporate intranet, with a
specific focus on MOSS 2007, during our free webinar Planning
for SharePoint Success (April 13).
“The Web
content management market is mature and expanding,” says Gartner’s latest
MarketScope for Web Content Management (MacComascaigh, Gilbert, Bell, Shegda, Andrews). “Vendor
consolidation has fallen (slowed)… functions such as workflow, ease of use and
multi-site management are no longer differentiating factors; they are the
norm.”
Findings:
Open source solutions (OSS, represents only 3% of the
total WCM market) are increasingly stable, robust and growing in market
share
Web 2.0 phenomenon is driving
WCM innovation
Change management and user
adoption will need to be applied to both internal and external users
The total WCM market, at $750
million per year, will grow at an annual rate of 15% through 2012
(representing 25% of the total ECM market)
Recommendations
for implementing a new WCM system (CMS):
Develop specific business
goals and link these to business objectives
Understand the cultural shift
represented by Web 2.0
Interoperability (multiple
systems working together or migrating from one to another) needs to be
considered, as does rationalization of multiple WCMs
Hosted SaaS solutions are not
growing as fast due to business and technical reasons
Total cost (TCO) of OSS solutions should take into
account initial price tag
Highest
rated vendors (strong positive):
Interwoven
Ektron
Lowest
rated vendors (caution advisories):
IBM (Lotus)
Mediasurface
Also of
note:
Vignette gets a positive
rating but with caution due their financial performance (also read Vignette
still in transition)
Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS)
is listed as a very average “promising” with lots of caveats and listed
weaknesses (see What the experts say about SharePoint (MOSS)
Gartner estimates a typical
replace of a WCM system to be around 5 years
My
analysis:
Gartner’s
MarketScope is somewhat different from the average Magic Quadrant in that the
qualifying vendors must have $10 million in licensing revenue to qualify, and
there is no magic quadrant but rather a 5-point rating scale:
Strong negative
Caution
Promising
Positive
Strong positive
While
there are hundreds of WCM solutions (thousands, really) only 17 qualify.
The
report is concise and solid intelligence for a representative snapshot look at
the current marketplace. This report is a good starting point to understanding
the market, but is not an adequate tool for helping an organization select a CMS. If you have significant
experience with WCM (CMS) and have very detailed and documented requirements and
plans for WCM, then a better report is the CMS Watch Web CMS Report 2009. If you
don’t have a solid understanding of the market and solutions, and what to watch
out for then you better consider Prescient’s CMS
Blueprint service.
Additional
notes on vendors:
Interwoven – Though due for a major tech upgrade, I
like how Interwoven has evolved in the past couple of years. The updated, AJAX-powered
U; the campaign management functions, etc. This is a
very powerful system, but overkill for an intranet… it’s sweet spot is the
external, product marketing website.
EPiServer – the Swedish-based
vendor is a real up-and-comer – and it’s average contract value is below
$10,000 which gives all the others a run for its money.
IBM (Lotus) – despite its
caution rating, this is still a reasonable solution… if you’re a Lotus
shop and/or use WebSphere. Outside that, there are far too many good-looking
alternatives.
Microsoft – I think it’s
generous to label SharePoint (MOSS) as WCM. It really is a portal /
development platform that is really quite weak bang-for-the-buck for WCM.
Garter cites its weaknesses particularly “ease of content reuse, multisite
management, workflow and enterprise-level federation capabilities such as
replication and multi-farm synchronization.” MOSS is a good enterprise
portal solution in a small to medium-size organization.
What is
absent:
The Content
Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification or standard was
ignored in this report.CMIS defines a
model or framework ensuring that content can be used by one or more Enterprise
Content Management repositories or systems. Frankly, I wouldn’t buy a WCM (CMS) if the selling vendor hasn’t
agreed to implement this standard.
(AARHUS, DENMARK: jboye08) “SharePoint
is good at a number of things,” says one SharePoint expert, addressing a group
of SharePoint users and followers here in Aarhus. “But it’s bad at just as many.”
There
continues to be much discussion, debate, interest, enthusiasm, and caution
about SharePoint (MOSS 2007). Such is the case here at jboye08 where I’m addressing
the conference on the subject of Intranet 2.0 (today) and eHealth 2.0
(tomorrow).
Gartner
nails the analysis in its spring report Five Best Practices for Deploying
SharePoint:
·“Though it covers a broad spectrum of capabilities, MOSS
2007 is not yet a full enterprise content management (ECM) system.
Organizations requiring advanced content management capabilities and
process-centric applications will need to augment their capabilities with
partner offerings, or deploy MOSS 2007 alongside an ECM system rather than as a
replacement for it.”
It might be the product for
you, but how do you know unless you analyse your requirements
A phased implementation
appears to be more successful, add bells and whistles later
Sharepoint in itself is not a
'strategy' - it can be part of ECM, Intranet or collaboration elements of
your overall Information Management strategy
Contrary to MS marketing
hype, Sharepoint does not actually do everything brilliantly
A Sharepoint deployment, like
any other technology implementation will ultimately fail if not aligned
with strategy, and if not properly planned with comensurate governance in
place
I should
disclose at this point that perhaps it might appear that I’m not a fan of
SharePoint – or that I oppose it. Not at all; in fact, we use SharePoint for
our own intranet and are upgrading to MOSS 2007. As well, we have many clients
that use WSS and MOSS. However, I do think however that SharePoint is being
used by too many organizations, including clients, that aren’t well served by
it.
I believe
there are two telling quotes, both by Shawn Shell and Alan Pelz-Sharpe, the
co-authors of the CMS Watch The
Sharepoint Report 2008 (TSR) (the best analysis report on MOSS that I’ve
seen) that best sum-up MOSS:
“MOSS is very good in smaller, workgroup environments (it’s not traditionally very good
for 5,000 or 10,000 concurrent users),” Alan Pelz-Sharpe (see SharePoint
overview (pros & cons, MOSS).
A number
of experts and users (owners / licensees) have weighed-in on their expert
opinions and analysis of SharePoint. To avoid any controversy and to protect
the individuals who were freely expressing and sharing their opinions here at
jboye08 in Aarhus, here are some of the more frank quotes:
“The perception is that the
search engine is terrible. I’m not 100% in agreement… the engine is pretty
good, but the search interface can be weak (e.g. the engine does support
wild card and Boolean searches, but usually the implemented interface does
not).”
“Personal sites (My Site
functionalilty) is both interesting and scary at the same time.”
“The complexity across farms
is ridiculous. Make sure your consultant (MS partner or implementer) give
you a list of those things that stop working across farms.”
Still
more advice from Information Week writer Nicolas Hoover (thanks to our own
Cathy Mcknight for bringing this to my attention, Can
Microsoft Keep SharePoint Rolling?)
“The software's
Swiss Army knife approach helps companies create more useful intranets, set up
document sharing, offer blogs and wikis, and build a richer online company
directory. This boundary-blurring nature is part of its appeal, and can even
help in budgeting: IT teams that might not get the nod for document management
software have been known to slip SharePoint into the Microsoft Office budget.
But
SharePoint's feature sprawl can be part of the problem. By taking what comes
bundled in SharePoint, companies can end up compromising on critical functions
compared with best-of-breed tools. And SharePoint deployments easily can go
wrong if IT teams just turn on additional modules without considering the
business case, requirements, and training needed to make them part of a
business process. SharePoint's all-in-one appeal may lessen as content
management standards become more prevalent, making best-of-breed approaches
more viable. Still, it's undeniable that SharePoint's on a roll because of
intense demand to better manage and share an expanding glut of diverse content."
If you
have MOSS, or are thinking of buying, Gartner offers the following
recommendations:
To ensure that SharePoint
does not become another content silo, build or update your enterprisewide
content management strategy to address collaborative and basic content management.
Build a broad inventory of
existing content management applications and repositories and assess the
investment levels in those before bringing in another platform such as SharePoint.
Define business requirements
and the corresponding technical and functional needs, which may span
collaborative and process-centric content applications. Map your content management
products to them with an eye toward minimizing the redundancy in
application development, IT operational or other costs.
Examine the integration
points required between MOSS 2007 and an ECM suite and assess the
availability tools and technologies to ensure interoperability.
Establish and enforce
governance policies regarding when to use and when not to use SharePoint.
MOSS 2007
is a wonderful solution – but its ideal for smaller companies, and can be a “massive
problem” for larger ones. I like it a lot, but I’m technology neutral and am
frank about its strengths and weaknesses. I’ll continue to recommend MOSS for
some, but not for others.
