Sharepoint Summit

Thanks to TFPL, and especially John Davies, for inviting me to their 'Sharepoint Summit' last week. As I said previously, I came to this fighting against a degree of prejudice regarding Sharepoint. My own experience of Sharepoint 2003 had been fairly underwhelming, and the views expressed at Wiki Wednesday had been fairly negative, too.

In many ways my fears proved founded. During the eight or so presentations plenty of weaknesses and limitations were highlighted. I won't go into detail, as James Lappin of TFPL has listed them on Twitter already. Not too surprising, perhaps, as Sharepoint attempts to cover six major information management bases: collaboration, portal, enterprise search, ECM, business processes & forms, business intelligence. It would be pretty surpising if it were best of breed in all these. The trouble is (although not for Microsoft or their certified partners) that IT departments are choosing Sharepoint as the solution to whatever the problem might be, then trying to patch up the deficiencies with widgets, bespoke code, etc. This all takes time and costs money. And it can be very messy. If one message came across loud and clear from the presenters, it was that you must think and plan ahead before implementing Sharepoint. If you don't you can get into a right old pickle.

Call me old-fashioned (actually perhaps new-fashioned is better here), but I thought the new wave of Web 2.0 in the enterprise was about lightweight software, small pieces loosely joined, mashups, emergence and so on. Sharepoint doesn't much sound like any of that to me. Then again, to be fair, I have been focusing mainly on collaboration / knowledge-sharing, which is only one of the six Sharepoint segments. Most of the case studies at this summit involved something more formal - a major intranet, a public website, a hub for integrating information being entered in multiple geographies, a workflow system. But I was left wondering about the wisdom of using Sharepoint for everything instead of picking best-of-breed products. I suppose it's a bit like the old debate about Hi-Fi: do you buy separate speakers, amp and CD player, from different manufacturers, or do you plump for a package from one? The argument for the package was put by Sharon Richardson of Joining Dots. Sharon should know a fair bit about Sharepoint, as she worked for Microsoft from 2000-2006 as Lead Technology Specialist for Sharepoint products in the UK. She took us back to the early '90s - which I am certainly old enough to remember - when Wordperfect was the No 1 word processor and Lotus 123 was the spreadsheet of choice. Word and Excel, she claimed, weren't necessarily better, they just worked better together. And the same argument applies to all the bits of Sharepoint. Well, this is something that jars with me, for two reasons. First, I'm not sure the interoperability of the early Office products was all that stunning, and to the extent that it was, was there not a little issue of some Windows code being concealed from non-Microsoft developers? Second, we're not talking any longer about an office suite of desktop products. The new standard is www (something that Bill G took a little while to 'get', incidentally). It should not be necessary to buy a suite like Sharepoint to get the interoperability and integration you need.

Perhaps I'm being overly negative. As some speakers said, Sharepoint can be tolerably good out of the box for an SME with modest requirements. And if you are a bigger firm which is happy to invest time to customise and extend basic Sharepoint, and prefers to work from a pre-existing platform (ready-made foundations, if you like) rather than build an app. from scratch, it might make sense also. One thing is clear: the Microsoft marketing machine is ensuring that for many companies Sharepoint becomes the one and only migration path for those whose world currently only contains Office, shared drives and Exchange, to one that is Web 2.0 - ish, if not Web 2.0 proper. Whether you like Sharepoint or not, it's going to be hard to ignore it.

Thanks again to TFPL for arranging a great day, and letting us see the warts as well as the beauty.

Knowledge-sharing? What's the problem?

Why do some (many? most?) organisations think that the tools they use now to enable knowledge-sharing are adequate? They will point to phones, email, perhaps texting, maybe instant messenger, shared drives, and assert that these are all that is required. (The first three, by the way, were mentioned by my 7 year old son when I tried to explain enterprise knowledge sharing to him.) They might also have videoconference facilities, web-based conferencing like Webex . Maybe somewhere someone uses an EDRMS / ECM system like Filenet or Documentum. (ECM of course stands for 'Enterprise Content Management', but does everyone have access to it? Probably not. More likely, a particular department uses it for a single purpose; for example the operations department uses it to scan paper transactional documents.)

So there is no shortage of channels available. But just as the existence of a wide choice of secondary schools in London does not mean that I have a satisfactory solution to my children's educational needs, the wide choice of communication channels available in the average organisation does not necessarily mean that they are able to share knowledge adequately, let alone well.

Let's look more closely at the problems associated with the the channels mentioned above. I'm going to save email for last, so I can devote plenty of space to laying the boot into it.

Phones, texting and IM are great for instant, one-to-one and one-to-several communication. It's not for nothing that the world has been using phones avidly for 100 years and that mobile phone companies are able to charge such premium prices. Their immediacy is a plus, and with phones, at least, there is potential richness to the communication, thanks to the use of intonation and so on. But where is the record? Does anyone store voicemails and use them as a knowledge base? I doubt it. And while clever companies like Autonomy claim to be able to search and manipulate the spoken word, this particular technology is used for (and I suspect will continue to be confined to) specialist purposes.

How about shared drives? Encourage people to use a shared drive instead of H: for team-relevant documents and the problem's solved, isn't it? Well, no, actually, as I suspect most people who have tried this will testify. In all but small organisations the shared drive is still usually an island, separated from other teams by the moats of team- and department-level access control. Not in the department? Sorry, you can't get at the stuff. "Don't worry, I'll email it to you." Damn, I said I'd leave email till last....

I've not finished with shared drives. Ever tried finding what you're looking for on a shared drive? It might contain a hierarchy of folders, but it probably won't have been designed with input from all users. It probably just grew organically. Or maybe the hierarchy was set up by an ex-member of the department some years ago, and no-one can remember the rationale behind the folder names. Then when you click on a folder and look at the contents, you get a baffling list of obscure titles. Want to find out what's inside? You have to click on each document, then close it when you find it's not what you were looking for. All very frustrating and time-consuming. In fact, if you know who the originator was, you'll probably pick up the phone and ask him or her to e - no, I said I'll leave that till last.

How about searching the shared drive using Windows Find? OK, sorry I even said it.

I'm going to lump Sharepoint in with shared drives. Having used Sharepoint regularly for about six months recently I think I know what I'm talking about. Sharepoint solves the 'islands of information' problem associated with shared drives, because, being web-based (yes, please!) it provides an enterprise-wide platform with (if desired) universal access. It also has some other quite decent features that I won't go into here. It's big weakness is that it's still structured like a shared drive, or at least it encourages you to use it that way. So you end up trying to navigate through the same inscrutable folder/document collections as before.

I'm going to skip over VCs and web conferencing, because they suffer from the same problem as phone/text/IM - no really useful repository.

What about EDRMS / ECM systems? Well, they are impressive suites of software, aren't they? They also have an impressive price tag. Furthermore, those that I have seen, insofar as they are used by everyone in the organisation - if they are - tend to be used as an overlay to MS office, shared drives and so on. They provide a management layer, which is OK perhaps, but really they are used to manage the mess that's been created through the use of the wrong tools in the first place. It's a bit like using a complicated computerised steering correction system in a car when you could simply have had the wheels rebalanced and the bearings adjusted instead.

Now, email... actually, I think I'll save that for the next post.