I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session.
- e2 Moderator – Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
- Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management, Microsoft
- Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst, Burton Group
- Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
SharePoint is a platform. The move from the 2003 version to the 2007 solidified the treatment as a platform. It is also getting better integrated with the rest of the Microsoft development framework.
SharePoint does require a big overall strategy. It’s not a lightweight deployment. But the deployment of lots of grass-roots deployments of Enterprise 2.0 tools causes lots of governance, privacy and control issues. SharePoint helped manage those issues. But the 2007 was flawed and caused its own sets of problems.
SharePoint 2010 requires top-level decisions and policies before the grass-roots content creation can begin. It’s tough to start small. Maybe the cloud version/SaaS model is better. It’s more agile.
Christian, after sitting quietly, pointed out that software is both a platform and an application. People to be able to use it right out of the box. He admits that SharePoint will not move as fast, but that means the platform is more stable. They are open as a platform, welcoming third-party add-ons to bring additional functionality.
The panelists agreed that SharePoint did a great job of focusing on things like records management. But SharePoint, with its 3 to 4 year development cycle, will always be behind the market. Christian points out that 3 years it the typical adoption cycle for software.