Should IT Put All Its Eggs in the Microsoft SharePoint Basket?
As applications found on the Web let end-users collaborate without needing IT's help or blessing, Microsoft has contended that SharePoint will be the "destination" platform that gives employees what they want and IT the management features necessary to running a business. Whether SharePoint turns out this way, however, is another matter altogether.
Bill Gates, for his part, remains bullish on SharePoint. In a recent presentation at Microsoft’s CEO summit, he gave an extensive demo of SharePoint to audience members.
On one hand, there’s plenty to like about SharePoint. This overview article, SharePoint demystified, describes why IT has been so hot on SharePoint: "it provides enterprise-class management tools for user administration, policy-based access and security management, relying heavily on Microsoft's Active Directory identity and policy management tool."
But then on the other hand, it's become what some pundits (and SharePoint competitors) call a "frankenapp": it has been constructed with many different (and moving) parts over time, conceived during different technology cycles. SharePoint started as a document management repository and place to make intranet sites, and now it has everything from BI to enterprise search to Web 2.0 tools.
The Web 2.0 tools became the focus of a SharePoint article we did this past week. SharePoint added wikis, blogs, and social networking capabilities back in the 2007 version of SharePoint, and after a year, SharePoint's flavor of Web 2.0 has garnered mixed reviews. The overall concensus: while the tools are a start, they don’t have the same capabilities as similar ones in the consumer space or those from pure play vendors who have focused on making these technologies enterprise-grade.
From an IT perspective, buying into the "SharePoint for everything" vision seems reasonable on the surface, but I wonder how end-users will feel about such a strategy.
That kind of lock-in has the potential to backfire for enterprises, because one vendor and one product can’t keep up with all the innovations in the consumer space. When that gap becomes wide, end-users rebel and grab what they need from the Web.
Previous Post: The Thing That Will Make Facebook Important to the Enterprise: More...Next Post: Will SaaS Have a Friend in CIOs?
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
