SharePoint Pros & Cons (2007-2010)

SharePoint Pros & Cons
Toby Ward, Prescient Digital Media
Strictly Confidential © 2009 Prescient Digital Media Not For Distribution

Prescient Digital Media
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@tobyward

History Lesson

7
Microsoft Sharepoint
Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS)‏
Basic document management (DM) & collaboration
Free download if you have a Windows Server license
Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS)‏
Web development, server, and portal services platform
Content management, more advanced document mgmt
Collaboration & social media tools (basic)
Separate server product, also requires MS SLQ Server

8
MOSS 2007
© 2008 Content and Code's visual representation of the SharePoint Platform

11
1. Portal
Good integration with other MS tools, such as Active Directory, MS Office
Personalisation centered on MySites
Simple but limited interface
Increasing third party Web Parts and integrations
More simple than deluxe solutions from IBM, Oracle
> CON: Limited personalization, integration, and bundled applications when compared to others.

My Site
1212+

13
2. Collaboration
Out of the box facilities for sharing lists, calendars, etc.
Integration (though difficult) with Exchange for calendars, task lists
Very simple Blog and Wiki templates
Integration with Instant Messaging
Team Sites (same as WSS) & MySites
> PRO: Real strength is inherent in Team Sites, site creation under Site Collections

Team Site

15
3. Content Management
Very simple CMS, but not advanced ECM
Very simple document management, via ‘Document Libraries’ is simplistic and basic (80% of what most orgs. need)‏
Simplistic records management (RM)‏
No native Digital Asset Management
Conversion of Word to HTML adds usual verbose MS code etc
> CON: Comparatively weak when compared to other ECM solutions

17
4. Business Intelligence
Marketed as “BI for the rest of us”
Centered on publishing Excel sheets
More complex scenarios requires Excel server components, BizTalk Server, etc.
MS Performance Management Server which can be accessed via Sharepoint portal and provides balanced scorecards, dashboards etc
> CON: Not really BI, but has the potential when you buy other products

18
5. Business Process
MOSS provides forms and integration to Windows Workflow
MOSS as a .Net development platform and front end
Full business process solutions would require BizTalk Server, possibly InfoPath, Visio, Sharepoint Designer, Visual Studio, etc.
> PRO: Strong forms capabilities

19
6. Search
Puts just as much emphasis on people as on documents or pages
Easy to customise query and results pages
Search includes ‘People’ search as standard
However, not universally well received
Enterprise search (for Enteprise License)‏
Web Parts for FAST (& other search engines)‏
> CON: MS bought FAST & integrates with other search engines... (confidence in their product?)‏

Search - versions
20

ShareView
21

Hawaiian Air
22

What the experts say...

24
Expert quotes:
“MOSS does a lot of things, but does very few things very well.”
Shawn Shell, Consejo Inc., author of the CMSWatch “The SharePoint Report”
>

25
Expert quotes:
“Though it covers a broad spectrum of capabilities, MOSS 2007 is not yet a full enterprise content management (ECM) system. Organizations requiring advanced content management capabilities and process-centric applications will need to augment their capabilities with partner offerings, or deploy MOSS 2007 alongside an ECM system.”
Gartner, “Five Best Practices for Deploying SharePoint”
>

26
Expert quotes:
“MOSS is very good for very good in smaller, workgroup environments (it’s not traditionally very good for 5,000 or 10,000 concurrent users).”
Alan Pelz-Sharpe, CMSWatch
>

27
Expert quotes:
“MOSS is very good for very good in smaller, workgroup environments (it’s not traditionally very good for 5,000 or 10,000 concurrent users).”
Alan Pelz-Sharpe, CMSWatch
>

28
Expert quotes:
“Without proper architecture and governance, I can guarantee you that SharePoint will fail.”
Bob Mixon, President of Mixon Consulting
>

29
Expert quotes:
“The software's Swiss Army knife approach helps companies create more useful intranets, set up document sharing, offer blogs and wikis, and build a richer online company directory. But SharePoint's feature sprawl can be part of the problem.”
Information Week columnist Nicolas Hoover

30
Expert quotes:
“We don't believe that MOSS presents a good fit for most E-Business scenarios or enterprise wide deployments in large organizations. Instead consider MOSS for department-level collaboration or intranet scenarios in mid-market organizations already using Microsoft extensively.”
Janus Boye, BoyeIT, Enterprise Portals Report – CMSWatch

31
Overall Pros
Subject to the specific needs of each client....
A good fit for clients heavily invested in MS infrastructure and .NET (custom .NET development)‏
A good collaborative workspace product for Team Sites and MySites
Simple, entry level WCM & records management
Potential with added investment for BI and BPM
Search also maybe ‘good enough’
> IDEAL: small company of 100-5000 needing a collaboration based portal in a .NET environment

32
Overall Cons
“Jack of all trades and master of none (little)”
Poor functionality and applications compared to others (simplistic content management, DM & RM)‏
Limited ‘out of the box’ experience but really a development platform for anything above basics
Limited personalization
Search is questionable at best
> CAUTION: Potential for unmanaged proliferation without careful planning & governance; not a large enterprise solution unto itself

33
Additionally...
Very expensive customization & additional licensing costs for Forms (InfoPath), BI and BPM modules
Lack of flexibility in IA, accessibility and taxonomies
Custom look-and-feel requires time and an experienced developer which might not be supported by MS
> NOTE: Requires heavy investment in MS products & is not truly SOA

SharePoint 2010

35
MOSS 2007
© 2008 Content and Code's visual representation of the SharePoint Platform

SharePoint 2010
Sites
Sites
Communities
Composites
Composites
Content
Insights
Content
Insights
Search
Search
© 2010 Prescient Digital Media Reproduction without permission is strictly prohibited 36

Biggest improvements
Web content management (WCM)
Publishing platform (Wiki)
Taxonomy & meta data
Social media
Records management (RM)
Digital asset management (DAM)
Search ???

Other notable changes
"Visual web parts” (no hard-coding of web parts)
Supports development / design on Vista & Windows 7
Integrated rich media & Silverlight
Improved Visual Studio & SQL
Upgrades from 2007 will include a complete migration of an existing home page design to 2010
Improved search algorithms & FAST Search integration
SharePoint Online - near feature parity by end of 2010

Wiki is the new platform
“Web Content Management in SharePoint 2010” SPC09

Ribbon editing

Formatting

Insert image

Taxonomy – managed terms

Managed keywords

Publishing Workflow

Pros
Wiki as a platform
Ribbon editing
Taxonomy / tagging controls
Integrated rich media & Silverlight
Fast Search integration
Better reporting / analytics
SharePoint Online - near feature parity by end of 2010

Cons
Expensive
Governance
Branding / design
Heavy infrastructure investment (64-bit platform)
Windows Server 2008 / Windows 7 64-bit
SQL Server 2008 64-bit
Workstations require Windows 7 and 2-3 GB RAM, etc.

Overall
Stick with MOSS 2007 or your current platform until mid-2011 (1st service pack)

Additional reading & resources:
Reading
IntranetBlog.com
The SharePoint Report (CMSWatch.com)‏
blogs.MSDN.com/sharepoint (MOSS team blog)‏
Learning
www.Microsoft.com/SharePoint/learning
Consulting Help
The SharePoint (MOSS) Plan (www.prescientdigital.com)

Communexions.com
For discussion & links to the slides

55
Toby Ward, President, Prescient Digital Media
toby@prescientdigital.com
www.PrescientDigital.com
www. IntranetBlog.com
www.Twitter.com/TobyWard
www.Twitter.com/Intranet2
www.Facebook.com (search “Intranet Global Forum”)‏
416.986.2226
Coming next week: Communexions.com

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SharePoint Pros & Cons (2007-2010)

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