There are small start-ups, emerging vendors, and the big enterprise portal and CMS vendors – all are developing and flaunting enterprise 2.0 software (social software). And none of these solutions are perfect.

In fact, even the big guns (e.g. BEA and Microsoft) haven’t figured it out yet. “Your WCM, Collaboration, Portal or ECM system may provide many (but not all) social software services, but some of them may suck,” says CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne.

Though not as broad and deep as the more mature CMS market, the emerging Enterprise 2.0 software market is rapidly growing with hundreds of vendors. Understanding those vendors and all of the emerging solutions is extraordinarily difficult, and would probably require a full-time team just to understand the leading vendors and solutions.

Byrne is an expert on evaluating software solutions (and of course has made a name for himself and a business from his CMS expertise demonstrated at www.CMSWatch.com). Tony provided a summary overview of the current marketplace in a presentation to the Enterprise 3 conference in San Diego, and offered some insights on the bigger enterprise infrastructure software vendors (which would include BEA, IBM, Microsoft, and other biggies).

Though Tony’s analysis and scoring of a solution feature is often done on a 4-point scale across many different categories, here’s my dimmed-down interpretation listed as either a general strength or weaknesses of the big gun vendor’s social software solutions (often bundled with their portal and/or CMS solution):

Strengths:

• Most of the tools are good at spam and naughty word filtering (though missing in the BEA products)
• Personalization
• Specialized handheld delivery (particularly important in Europe)
• Vocabulary, tagging and cloud services

Weaknesses:

• Multi-installation management (“Almost always the answer is “no!” … SharePoint is a perfect example)
• Repository versioning, version control, and search
• Composite application development
• Workflow and process management
• Configuration management – version control of the system and platform (as opposed to the content)
• Internationalization & localization
• Standards compliance

Without question, however, the big guns generally have very shallow solutions that do not compare to the feature-rich and robust solutions of the new start-ups and emerging enterprise 2.0 vendors. But of course, the risks of purchasing a solution from a start-up is inherent – you trade long-term solution viability (i.e. financial strength of the vendor) for less cost and more leading-edge (i.e. bleeding edge).

Tony also provided an introductory analysis of one emerging solution vendor, cited by Gartner as a “Cool Vendor” last year, ConnectBeam. Connectbeam is a turnkey appliance with “an integrated set of social software applications for information sharing and team collaboration”.  In short, ConnectBeam is a solution that allows employees to create rich profiles and to tag and share (social bookmark) content.

Specifially, ConnectBeam lists amongst its product features:

• Social Bookmarking & Tagging 
• Social Networking
• Project communities
• Expert location
• Collective Intelligence  (search toolbar)

Users can import their browser bookmarks and their Deli.co.us bookmarks and share those with other employees as tagged content or via their own profiles (it comes with plug-ins for IE and Firefox (not all vendors have a FireFox vendor).

In a very cursory review (he did an admirable job in a short, one-hour presentation), Tony summed-up ConnectBeam as being good at information filtering, security and access control; but weak for group discussion, creating content, and people finding – and does not come with any RSS feeds. It also has low visibility and therefore its long-term future is not yet known.

Some of Tony’s other recommendations and cautions:

• Socializing software is good, but its is not the same as social software (i.e. just because it’s a good portal solution doesn’t mean it’s a good social software platform)
• The concept of social software is old, but many of the dominant technologies are immature
• Don’t lose site of proper software evaluation techniques

“There is a notion that the tool itself will engender informal ways of working and that you can be similarly casual when introducing a new tool (i.e. social software such as a wiki)…” adds Byrne. “But you shouldn’t leave behind every thing you know about performance, security, and the long-term viability of the vendor.”

In short, due diligence is necessary when evaluating any technology solution.

You can view Tony’s research and summaries of some of his and his analyst’s now famous reports at www.CMSWatch.com.

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“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 this week.

“40-60% of SharePoint implementations fail (citing Gartner) – usually because it’s been improperly architected. If it balloons to several hundred or thousands of SharePoint sites then people will begin to complain that they cannot find anything.”

In fact, without proper governance, SharePoint can become the worst nightmare for intranet spawl police and those desperately trying to avoid the “wild, wild west.” One of Mixon’s clients complained to him, “We have 18,000 SharePoint sites and no one we can find anything!” (a complaint cited by one of Bob’s clients). 

 Microsoft's visual representation of the SharePoint Platform

The risks of intranet sprawl – and letting anyone to create a Team Site with no rules, guidance or governance – substantially undermine the value of an intranet:

·         Information is not aggregated by type or channel

·         Users will not be able to obtain relevant search results

·         Users will not know where to store or classify information

·         Users will not be able to find information through navigation

Mixon quickly points out that even Microsoft failed in their first iteration of SharePoint for their own intranet. “After one year, they had 60,000 intranet sites! They had to completely re-architect the entire intranet (MS Web).”

“The amount of information in your portal will grow over time and you will soon forget where information resides.”

To avoid intranet spawl and information overload, Mixon recommends proper architecture, taxonomy creation, and governance. The other approach is to simply forgo these steps and dump all your documents into SharePoint

But Mixon says that not all information in an organization has to be classified. On average 40% should be classified according to the taxonomy. He also cautions publishers to not overuse met data: no more than 3 to 5 required metadata types. However, SharePoint does not allow users to tag content as of yet (not unlike how content is tagged on Flick, YouTube or using Deli.co.us), but its coming in the next release (expected in 2010).

Search will also not always relieve the challenges posed by information overload. Without proper context, your standard search engine can’t rate one document veruss another. Even the great Google can’t save you from the deleterious affects of Intranet Spawl. “Google Applicance will not work well with Sharepoint, Webshpere, PeopleSoft, etc. because it doesn’t know anything about context or security,” says Mixon. “I have clients that have spent $300,000 or $400,000 on a Google Applicance and then they end up unplugging it.”

To improve navigation and search, Mixon recommends a strong taxonomy, meta tagging and classification. “Content classification is the only means of providing us with:

• Context
• Relevant search results, reducing the amount of information searched using search scopes
• Aggregation of specific types of information

One of the most significant shortcomings of SharePoint is the ability to build a true taxonomy. Mixon points to the many benefits of a taxonomy and classification system:

• Holistic view of documents and related artifacts
• Document management services
• Activity audit trail
• Promotes consistent PM methodologies
• Promotes consistent use of templates
• Virtual collaboration amongst disparate groups
• Aggregation across multiple projects

Bob has made this presentation and others available for download on his blog:

http://www.bobmixon.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=61

RELATED READING:

The pros and cons of SharePoint

Don’t forget to add the tax(onomy)

Fixing the sucky search problem

Intranet information architectures

Social bookmarking the intranet

Equality amongst intranet search engines

SharePoint continues to be at the center of much of the intranet buzz – regardless of the water cooler, conference or country.

Shawn Shell, CEO of Consejo, and author of CMS Watch’s The SharePoint Report 2008 from CMS Watch, accurately summarizes SharePoint in one telling quote during his SharePoint presentation at Enterprise 3: “SharePoint does a lot of things, but it does very few things very well.”

I have maintained for sometime that SharePoint is an excellent intranet platform for departments, or small to medium-size enterprises. We in fact use it for our intranet at Prescient Digital Media (disclosure: we are fully technology-neutral with no partnerships nor reselling agreements with any technology vendor including Microsoft). But I don’t think that Sharepoint (MOSS 2007) is an appropriate enterprise intranet for medium to large organizations that need more robust content management, document management, and application integration. Nonetheless, SharePoint does have its strengths, and weaknesses, regardless of the client organization.

In no particular order, here are some of Shawn’s insights on SharePoint (and his company Consejo works almost exclusively on SharePoint implementations):

PROS:

• Biggest strength: collaboration features and forcing compliance with information management policies. 

OTHER STRENGTHS:

• Blogs are built into every My Site
• Wikis are out of the box
• Reports – the ability to display and work with data from an Xcel worksheet.
• Simple to use out-of-the-box
• Search is very fast
• Contributing content is simple
• Direct integration with Office (XP to 2007)
• Most functionality “exposed” through web services (e.g. all content can be subscribed to via RSS)
• Mobile views via a PDA or phone is out-of-the-box
• Alerts and workflow (though limited to email notification)
• WSRP and SAP integration is included

I would add that if you’re an enterprise Microsoft customer, you can get MOSS for very cheap if not free (but the licensing typically represents 10-30% of the total cost). As well, simple out-of-the-box SharePoint management needs little to no training.

CONS:

• Biggest weakness: Records management and digital asset management (non existent).

OTHER WEAKNESSES:

• The wiki piece is a little weak (“The rumor is that the wiki and blog components were very late additions… they work very well, but the functionality is considerably lower than what you would expect from an enterprise deployment.”)
• Sharepoint does not support AJAX (though there are work-arounds, MS will not support AJAX)
• Customization can be expensive and complex (and limited)
• Content management (“It’s very average content management… its not very fabulous.”)
• Analytics are very, very simple
• Non-Active Directory authentication capabilities
• Social networking built into MySites
• Search returns documents and people
• WSRP and SAP integration is not terribly strong, but it works. 

I would add the following weaknesses: immature technology, weak templates, and a reputation for weak service and training.

Shawn’s recommendations when considering or implementing SharePoint:

• Understand information quantities and needs
• Don’t just throw collaboration tools out there (he cited one client with “out-of-control” team sites and SharePoint sprawl)
• Establish & enforce standards for use
• Establish and closely monitor metrics for content creation
• Continually evaluate and adjust approach to match reality
• Enforce workspace use metrics
• Notify of non-use after 60 days
• Four notifications
• Delete after fourth notification
• Use workflow to suspend assets
• Re-map and migrate intranet sites into Sharepoint
• Use Search to Capture Outlying Sites
• Create a controlled vocabulary (taxonomy and meta data)
• Measure and measure again
• Track search requests against workgroup assets

By the way… the next version of Sharepoint will be released in 2010 along with Office version 14 (MS is superstitiously skipping version 13).

ADDITONAL READING:

Sharepoint to be the new Windows?

Why you should or shouldn’t choose Microsoft Sharepoint

Download the new Sharepoint; Vendor perception versus reality

JUST FOR FUN:

Here's a young kid who is a master impersonator (killer, really) who uses his celebrity voices when reading from the SharePoint marketing material:

http://www.spike.com/video/2869058?cmpnid=716&pt=sr&refsite=7103

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