Driessen Samuel's Library tagged sharepoint → View Popular

It increasingly appears there is no such thing as Enterprise 2.0-in-a-box
There seem to be countless choices when it comes to communication and collaborating in today’s workplace.
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- But when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 in particular — and you can read my most detailed explanation of exactly what the concepts of Enterprise 2.0 are here — the software solution that most organizations seem to reach for today in an almost knee-jerk reaction is Microsoft Sharepoint.
- 55% of organizations have implemented or are considering implementing SharePoint (Global Intranet Trends 2009 report - 227 participant organizations)
  
  46% of those companies using social media on the intranet are using
  
  SharePoint(Intranet 2.0 Global Survey – 430+ participant organizations)
  
  Only 47% of organizations have a defined governance model (Intranet 2.0 Global Survey)
  
  70% use at the department level; only 38% use it at the enterprise level (AIIM)
- Portal, search, content management, workflow, and business intelligence.
- SharePoint also has open architecture that ensures that almost anything that is perceived as missing can be supplemented by acquiring one of the many 3rd party addons or by custom development of what is needed.
- “free your intranet”
- I should also be clear that SharePoint can be used to do a lot more than what we usually ascribe to Enterprise 2.0, the latter for which the elevator pitch is freeform, emergent, social collaboration and less the physical document share methodologies (such sharing Word, Excel, PDF, etc. files) it was originally designed for.
- As a result of all this, and due the fact that the single most frequently asked question I get about Enterprise 2.0 is if SharePoint is a suitable platform for it (short answer: it definitely depends)
- innovation in social and collaborative systems is almost exclusively coming from the consumer Web
- SharePoint, at least out of the box, fails the SLATES test.
- To be fair, the SharePoint community has also been proactive on this topic, and the relatively new SharePoint Community Kit goes a good bit of the way towards resolving many of these issues.
- SharePoint is strong many of these points with excellent Active Directory integration and better support for enterprise technologies.
- but not best of breed and SharePoint has credible unified search capabilities (which is the “S” in SLATES) and works especially well if SharePoint is the only document management, portal, and knowledge management infrastructure in the organization.
- This makes opening up SharePoint environments to work with partners, customers, and even the general public, one of the more requested Enterprise 2.0 scenarios in my experience, to be more difficult than with other platforms which were designed to function in highly diverse environments.
- The lesson: The more cookie-cutter SharePoint installations are, the easier they are to manage but the more they unnaturally constrain their use and prevent desirable outcomes.
- One of the consistent messages I heard when speaking to SharePoint practitioners is the product’s complexity and high cost.
- Invariably, this means highly trained implementors, administrators, and technical support staff are required to deploy and run it, which all add to the total cost of ownership. And SharePoint’s inherent sophistication can also mean slow adoption and low engagement by users. In fact, this is a central lesson in Web 2.0 design, that complexity is the enemy of ease-of-use and adoption; most 2.0 products are almost brutally simple in their user experience. SharePoint is also priced as an enterprise product and can be very expensive (at least compared to most Enterprise 2.0 products) for a large installation.
- However, emphasizing the tool first, no matter how ready-at-hand, to create an enterprise-class information management solution is rarely the proper way to go — other than for solely financially expedient reasons — and rarely is that the only criteria.