The Microsoft Stack: Microsoft's SharePoint Hits Sweet Spot as the Next Killer App

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AS OF 8/20/2008 9:04AM EST

The Microsoft Stack: Microsoft's SharePoint Hits Sweet Spot as the Next Killer App
By Patrick Hynds

July 15, 2008 —

SharePoint is on fire across the country and across the globe. Everywhere I go, I see organizations, especially in the Federal government and defense sector, adopting or digging deeper into SharePoint implementations.

I have been around SharePoint since before it was a thought, because I was steeped in Site Server, which was the precursor product that included the search technology that became the core of the original SharePoint.

Now it has made the vital jump to Microsoft Office interoperability and has been doing it for enough versions to have survived the "will it continue to be supported?" waiting period that many of us use as a measure of whether something is safe to adopt.

If you are not well versed in what SharePoint offers, it is worth your time to pay some attention, as it might well be in your future. The big draw is that SharePoint takes a big chunk of unstructured data off the file servers and puts it into structured SQL Server storage. A lot of really useful extra functionality comes with it, such as content-based search, user maintainable metadata, versioning and powerful collaboration functionality for things like creating project Web sites.

SharePoint is a glue technology that holds together database storage in SQL Server, Web provisioning for easy manipulation, and, as I mentioned before, easy integration with Microsoft Office. Support for lists and document versioning make it very easy to justify in project-based environments, where a portal for team coordination and document libraries for data consolidation make sense.

One major stumbling block in wrapping your mind around this technology is that there are Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). WSS comes with built-in Windows 2003 Server and Windows 2003 Small Business Server, and includes the base features that enable the setup and use of project-based and individual Web sites. MOSS adds the massive collaboration and search features that make it a compelling solution.

On the development side, MOSS provides a framework to customize pretty much anything in the system. This has resulted in many organizations using the base functionality of SharePoint as the jumping-off point for developing powerful workflow and document management applications. Even that base functionality is quite impressive for getting information into a shareable format.

WSS and MOSS both support blogs, which help subject matter experts share their insights without clogging inboxes, calendaring for coordinating events and milestones, wikis that help form the basis for documentation once a project is completed, surveys to gain consensus from the team without a time-wasting meeting, presence to facilitate ad hoc meetings, and issue tracking to keep the problems with any project in sight. This is the Swiss Army knife of collaboration solutions and provides some major building blocks for customization.

With MOSS, you also get content search capabilities with a much more powerful version of the MS Index Server. If you recall, that engine allowed indexing of popular file formats including office docs, PDFs and pretty much anything with a text foundation. It also brings to MOSS the ability to index and therefore search against Exchange information stores. By providing both document and e-mail search, the user gets comprehensive search across all of their significant data.

In recent years Microsoft has been pitching out a lot against the technology wall and watching to see if it sticks. Even small success has carved out quite a few spaces and competitive scenarios, but SharePoint has hit a sweet spot, it seems. There are competitors, but most of them are only point solutions that address a small part of what SharePoint provides.

The biggest threat to SharePoint expansion would be DotNetNuke, an open-source implementation of a significant fraction of SharePoint's Web deployment attributes. It really isn't much of a threat in the enterprise, though, precisely because it is open source and not supported by any major entity.

I think that SharePoint is on its way to becoming the next killer app provided Microsoft avoids missing the real value proposition the customers are deriving from it now. Let's hope Microsoft doesn't get too visionary for its own good and expand SharePoint beyond the spot it now occupies so well. It is all about collaboration and acceleration of information sharing.

Patrick Hynds is the president of the consulting firm CriticalSites and has been appointed as a Microsoft Regional Director for his expertise on Microsoft technology. He can be reached at phynds@criticalsites.com.

Related Search Term(s): SharePoint Server, Microsoft

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