MOSS 2007 = MS Access 1995 ?

SharePoint Technologies has always been my favourite product since its early days way back from 2001 to today’s MOSS 2007.

This product has come a long way since then from be it on the storage (File based WebDav system to SQL based query system) or on the front end(ASP to ASP.NET) or on the design tools(from No support to Front Page

which is now the dedicated SharePoint Designer) or WorkFlow(just from document approval serial / parallel to full-fledged WF engine) or content management (from nothing to reasonable support) or search (from primitive to extensive). Things like integrating Live communicator is the icing on the cake.

Any CIO or Chief knowledge officer who invested on SharePoint would be beaming with happy that he has met his biggest objective of creating a culture of moving user generated unstructured information from individual desktop to centralized SharePoint Storage.

Once deployed and open to users, SharePoint spreads like wildfire. Particularly it’s a darling for collaborative teams spread across different locations. It is quite easy to understand start using it.

Here are few observations

SharePoint spreads like wild fire. Once in, enterprise CIO’s and CKO’s can never get rid of SharePoint. It’s just not that easy. I would say it has achieved the distinction of today’s Lotus Notes.

It will be a real pain if deployment not planned well. Given its ASP.Net based front end and central SQL based storage, if not planned well for scalability and storage, users will start seeing huge performance degradation which may lead to huge dissatisfaction issues.

User education will lead to better usage and ROI. Users need some amount of training in smartly using, customizing and configuring it. For example, instead of creating multiple document libraries, one could create additional column for document taxonomies. Some excellent features like Excel Services and InfoPath Form Server will go unutilised without proper user training.

Worry about manageability training – if not prepared, like any other internet application, you will start seeing sudden performance and use dissatisfaction issues as the user base increases. Getting your IT staff up to speed on Planning / Deploying / Managing / administering / Performance tuning is very important so that they know how to address these things when things go out of control

Power of Web Parts – Out of the box web parts will quickly run out of their use. Users will need more and more as the start using SharePoint. This is one area Microsoft is lagging behind and they have not invested into providing more web parts. Listen to your users and get some custom web parts developed to suite your organization needs. There is already a shortage of SharePoint design skills though it follows the same ASP.NET web development model.

Leverage BI Capabilities - SharePoint has tremendous capabilities to deliver BI to the masses inside your enterprise. Use capabilities such as BDC to connect to your back end systems like SAP and deliver BI to your users. Connecting to a SQL Cube is a cake walk.

Transactional Systems on MOSS –I am already seeing requests around ways to integrate Transactional systems within MOSS. While BDC (Business Data Catalogs) come handy in reporting, they have their own limitations. Get your teams to think about how to handle such requests.

I am not surprised that in their recent review Forrester advising IT heads to gear up for supporting MOSS like how MS Access apps grew uncontrolled in 1990s…