SharePoint: What are the risks, rewards?

What does it say about SharePoint when a presentation focused on whether you can survive it packs the house?

Mark Gilbert's presentation--"Can the CIO survive Microsoft SharePoint?"--at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo filled up an auditorium. There are two ways to read this:

• There is a massive amount of interest--something Gilbert highlighted. "The interest is massive," says Gilbert.
• CIOs are looking to SharePoint as a way to solve all of those enterprise 2.0 collaboration headaches.
• Or folks aren't sure they will survive it.

The rub: You can screw up SharePoint. Gilbert noted that SharePoint can be complicated. SharePoint boils down to MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) and WSS (Windows SharePoint Services). Eighty percent of the audience here used some sort of SharePoint, but the show of hands indicating using MOSS or WSS was a lot smaller. Given the following slide it's possible that folks aren't sure what they are using.

Simply put, WSS gets you in the door, but MOSS makes Microsoft money. In any case, Gilbert said SharePoint is an adolescent application. "It has its license and thinks it’s an adult, but we all know better," said Gilbert. He added that MOSS doesn't scale well and has search limitations, which Microsoft tries to solve by upselling you FAST search. Microsoft recently acquired FAST.

Gilbert's presentation detailed:

MOSS can be used in a variety of creative ways, but the foundation applications are as: a tactical content management service, providing a place to store, find and deliver documents and other content in a business-process context, supported by library services and workflow tools; a teamware collaboration system combining team support tools, such as shared calendars, to-do lists, virtual meeting rooms, discussion threads and business process management; and a portal, aggregating content and application interfaces in a Web environment for intranet replacement. MOSS, however, is like a Swiss army knife. Because it is a collaboration tool, a content management tool, a portal and an application development platform all rolled into one, there is inherently a compromise.

Overall, Gilbert's talk focused on the risks and rewards:

"There's a lot of good with SharePoint, but there's a lot that doesn't work as well," said Gilbert.

Among the SharePoint tips:

• Govern SharePoint. If left unfettered companies can find themselves with multiple WSS sites. What happens if you get sued? Can you track it down? Things like data retention, own of the sites, workflow, life span and records are all items that need to be documented. And SharePoint data is stored in SQL so you need to govern both. Gilbert noted that provisioning and removing users is difficult.
• You will need internal experts. SharePoint is complicated and you'll need to develop experts in MOSS portals and other features.
• Don't forget the server replication. SharePoint can create numerous islands of data that don't connect. Gilbert noted that Lotus Notes servers at least recognize each other. Gilbert said the fix here is to centralize a SharePoint rollout and deliver it as a server. Think SharePoint server farms.