Truth be told (and despite the hype), SharePoint 2010 isn't truly multi-tenant either. Though it's far ahead of its predecessor, the current version of SharePoint in O365 still has plenty of warts. For example, Microsoft announced a "new" feature of SharePoint Online in Business Connectivity Services (BCS).  Terrific!  The trouble is that BCS is a feature of SharePoint on-premise and Online is just catching up. 

During the keynote demo, Microsoft demonstrated BCS.  They showed a SharePoint Online application connected to SQL Azure that produced some nifty charts.  The demo got applause, but prompted Jeremy Thake from AvePoint to tweet: "Why use azure worker role to submit vote & not straight in #SharePoint list? 'coz we can!'"  Unfortunately, the real answer is that BCS only supports connecting to a web service (specifically a Windows Communication Foundation or WCF service).  As a result, this other web site (the Azure worker role) actually "shimmed" the SQL database with web services to enable the connection.

Beyond BCS, the story is quite uneven.  For features like Word, InfoPath and Excel Services, Microsoft has crafted a "value-added" subscription model (pay more, get more).  Other services, like managed metadata (a major feature of SharePoint 2010) are simply unavailable.  And, as I’ve mentioned, in the BCS case, Microsoft had to cripple the service to make it cloud compatible.  In the end, despite the new 2010 architecture, Microsoft was unable to effectively manipulate their service applications to truly understand multi-tenant environments; the services simply can't differentiate one tenant from another within the same farm (though if you have a private farm, the architecture works relatively well).

That said, no could argue anything other than SharePoint is poised to compete effectively with Google apps and other low-cost alternatives among individual professionals and small businesses.  Pure on-premise implementations were out of reach for the vast majority of small businesses and, certainly, individual professionals.  O365 falls into both the "it just works" and "it's good enough" categories of technology favored by SMB customers. 

Other so-called "SharePoint Killers" have been beating the cost, complexity or adoption drum (or all three) to differentiate themselves from the behemoth on-premise enterprise SharePoint product. Unfortunately, many of these products merely compete with SharePoint along one or two functional dimensions (like simple file sharing or light document management). However, their arguments hold less credibility in an O365 world, where the cost per user for enterprise-class e-mail (Exchange), internet-based collaboration (SharePoint) and real-time messaging (Lync) legitimately starts at $6 per month. Moreover, all of the services packaged in O365 are quite well integrated into the most widely adopted desktop productivity tool on the planet -- Office. 

So for the Davids of the SMB market, Goliath is calling and he's looking a bit more trim. For the larger enterprise market, SharePoint in the Cloud still has a ways to go....

While some have criticized our comparing SharePoint to Lotus Notes, I think the comparison is nevermore appropriate.  The two platforms, though different in terms of functionality, are identical in the ways that count: adherents fanatically defending the technology, with a very large partner ecosystem and a committed community developing surprising solutions from generic features.  Like Notes, the real value of SharePoint is well beyond the core constructs the platform provides.  As I have said many times, SharePoint-based solutions generally "look" nothing like SharePoint.  These solutions make inventive use of platform facilities to create something greater and specific to the problem the solution needs to solve.  This was/is true for Notes and it is even more true for SharePoint.  Just look at SharePointReviews or Microsoft's own "solution directory" for a glimpse of the breadth of the add-on ecosystem; this will help you understand the diversity that's possible. Of course, the same predilection for extension and bespoke development got Notes shops into trouble too.

Where the comparison between Notes and SharePoint diverge, in my mind, is the sheer size of the connected product sets from Microsoft (and others) and the potential for SharePoint growth as a result.  The best example is Office.  SharePoint's 120 million licenses sold is an astonishing figure for a collaboration product.  However, when you compare that to a Microsoft-reported 1 billion user population for Office, the SharePoint community seems rather small.  IBM and Lotus Corp before them could never boast such a large productivity tool install base, nor were they able to bring related collaboration tools to as wide a market as Microsoft.

As individuals and organizations of all sizes are increasingly geographically distributed, information workers  (to use Microsoft's vernacular) will continue to drive demand for network-based file and information sharing as well as more real-time and disconnected communication vehicles.  With the launch of Office365 this past June, previously impractical on-premise SharePoint implementations for individuals or small firms become a simple subscription to SharePoint in a shared environment.  More importantly, the subscription isn't limited to SharePoint, since it includes other connected products like Exchange, Office and Lync.  And while all four products are presented separately, packaged as Office365, they start to appear as simply features of a broader productivity suite.  As a result, like Office did for Word, Excel & PowerPoint, Office365 will "drag" SharePoint into a previously inaccessible user population.  In fact, the meteoric growth of SharePoint 2010 (roughly 65 million licenses or about 50% of all SharePoint licenses), could be eclipsed by SharePoint vNext as both organizations and individuals really start to sign-up for Office365.   If we further consider the co-star of the SharePoint Conference, Azure, Microsoft has created what could only be called a very diverse productivity offering.

Should everyone run out and adopt SharePoint?  No.  While I firmly believe we have not yet seen the crest of SharePoint growth, buyers should continue to carefully weigh what tools make sense for them.  Remember that SharePoint 2010 remains the same product it was two years ago (minus some modest updates through service packs).  It is not best of breed in most functional categories.  And while Office365 may have made SharePoint technology practically available to more users, the SharePoint portion of the O365 feature set still has meaningful limitations when compared to on-premise SharePoint. 

This year's SharePoint Conference consistently delivered the "steady as she goes" message and Microsoft effectively reminded everyone why SharePoint has been a success.  Office365 was a very clear highlight and even the limited announcements (like the addition of BCS in SharePoint Online) implicitly and explicitly hints at the underlying strategy Microsoft has adopted around these products.  However, my previous advice still holds: when evaluating SharePoint across a single use dimension like web content management or business intelligence, you're unlikely to find it effectively competing with pure-play tools.  SharePoint's real value is and will continue to reside in its breadth of functionality and connections to other Microsoft tools like Office and Lync; these are very compelling attributes to be sure.  If your organization needs to implement an intranet, an extranet and an internet site (or some combination), SharePoint may be a good fit to help consolidate technology platforms and skillsets.

That's a platform view, however, and often business stakeholders want something more practical. For a pure-play, single dimension tool to solve a singular aspect of your content management challenges, like web content, you'll be best served to carefully evaluate other tools alongside SharePoint to ensure the best fit.

Kurt DelBene (Microsoft President of the Office Group) fielded harsh criticism regarding the lack of "new" information or big product announcements during the conference. His response was blunt: our product teams haven't been sitting around for two years, it's just too early to share.  In fact, Microsoft went out of their way to focus on what the core product does today and "remind" everyone in attendance (some 7,500 people) that SharePoint 2010 is still thoroughly relevant.  Jeff Teper (VP, SharePoint Product Group) even went as far as to claim that he didn't want anyone at the conference to walk away and say "I didn't know SharePoint could do that."

On balance, this message isn't exactly a disappointment.  In my experience talking about SharePoint as well as building solutions on the platform virtually everyday, it's not all that hard to miss less-used or less "popular" features.  SharePoint, as I've said before, is a vast software platform that can be used to develop many different solutions.  Consultants, like customers, tend to focus on those features and functions that support common business scenarios.  Less frequently used features often get forgotten.

For example, most firms are familiar with Excel Services; it provides a way to surface an Excel workbook in a web interface and enable some limited editing.   This service has been around since SharePoint 2007 and it works well.   However, what is less used is the REST programming interface (introduced in 2010) for accessing both charts and data in that workbook.  With this interface (which is merely a series of URLs), you can dynamically or statically embed an Excel chart (or other data) in a blog post, Word document or PowerPoint presentation without programming.  You can also keep that embedded chart in sync with the source chart in that workbook without having to do more than update the workbook.   While I've seen many customers use Google or Yahoo for creating dynamic charts, SharePoint buyers have this capability in-house and don't seem to know it.

It's easy for gurus to get frustrated by the lack of news, but for SharePoint customers, I think the messages that Microsoft is promoting for this conference are relevant, even if predictable.  Many enterprises are still struggling with SharePoint 2007 or just starting to deploy SharePoint 2010.  One typical SharePoint customer I spoke with has had their 2010 solution in place for only five months, while others are just starting their migration.  Too many customers have multiple technologies simply sitting on the shelf; you should look at what you already own before buying the next shiny object.

A few interesting tid-bits did emerge:

• Redmond announced a partnership with WebTrends to bolster analytics.  SharePoint 2010 has some basic analytics in the box, but they're just that: basic.  The WebTrends deal sparks hope that we'll see higher-grade analytic capabilities not only around the typical internet-facing sites, but also deeper insight into internal behaviors as well.
• Office 365 is getting more functionality.  Microsoft is finally adding support for Business Connectivity Services in the cloud.  This means that customers on SharePoint Online can begin to connect their O365 SharePoint sites to external data sources, assuming that data is Web Service enabled.  While BCS isn't a new feature to SharePoint, it is bringing O365 and the on-premise versions closer to parity.
• Kurt DelBene seemed to suggest that Microsoft is also evaluating different release cycles; they want to commit to a quarterly release cycle on O365 and may experiment with new ways to deliver features for on-premise implementations outside of the typical 36-month cycle.  He was, however, careful to say they don't have anything formalized and are still working on the details. (We've heard this before.)

Outside of the reminders and some minor announcements, Microsoft was again promoting its ecosystem.  This is something I and others at RSG have discussed at length; SharePoint has an enviable collection of independent software vendors (ISVs) that build add-ons, systems integrators that develop customer implementations, and a developer community that virtually no other platform can equal.  As such, Microsoft did a bit of promoting both during the conference and through a blog post welcoming folks to the conference.  With a Microsoft-reported 700,000 developers and more than 1,000 ISV solutions (read: add-ons), the momentum seems to continue to build around the product.  That post also included some interesting statistics on the customer base, including a breakout of pure SharePoint 2010 licenses.

While pure-play vendors will continue to outshine SharePoint in specific functional categories, the platform continues to maintain a unique market position based on the breadth of functionality and depth of its ecosystem.  SharePoint 2010 can be a viable answer for many different problems, but there's still much to be learned about the platform before we all start musing about SharePoint 2013.

Unfortunately, customer confusion is completely warranted.  First, there are several different "versions" of SharePoint available; do you want Foundation, Standard or Enterprise?  There are also add-ons like "SharePoint for Internet Sites" and "FAST Search Server."  Depending on what you need and the features you would like to leverage, there's a seemingly dizzying array of choices.

Adding to this overall confusion, Microsoft has developed their "cloud" offering.  In late 2008, Microsoft release "Business Productivity Online" or BPOS, which included, among other products, a cloud-based version of SharePoint.  The original offering has a relatively straight-forward single tier licensing approach based on the number of users and whether you wanted a "full" or the "deskless" experience.   As of June 2011, Microsoft released the updated version of BPOS called Office365.  Unlike BPOS, Office365 introduces additional licensing levels across two main business size distinctions – you're either a small/professional business or you're a medium enterprise.  Depending on which category your business fits, there are several new license choices ranging from $6 per user to $27; each choice provides a different combination of features and products.

To be fair, Microsoft is not the only vendor struggling with licensing.  Many vendors in this space have trouble presenting an intelligible licensing scheme.  My colleague Tony Byrne recently commented in his "When WCM Vendors choke on the Cloud" post that many WCM vendors are struggling to adapt their licensing models to account for new cloud infrastructure.  In this respect, Microsoft has the double challenge of trying to create understandable license models for both cloud-based and on-premise implementations.

To help our customers begin to make sense of their choices, we have recently released a SharePoint licensing advisory paper.  In the paper, we explain how to distinguish the various versions of SharePoint, we describe what's necessary to license for specific scenarios (e.g., company Intranet vs. a public-facing web site) and highlight other kinds of licensing necessary to comply with Microsoft’s licensing requirements.

Cloud computing, by definition, is "Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid." (source: Wikipedia on Cloud Computing). The definition goes on the say that "[c]loud computing is a paradigm shift following the shift from mainframe to client-server in the early 1980s. Details are abstracted from the users, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure 'in the cloud' that supports them." Wikipedia also mentions that cloud resources are often "dynamically provisioned."

However, a recent experience with a major Microsoft hosting partner lead me to the conclusion that some vendors may be giving themselves more definitional "flexibility." For example, this particular vendor was trying to sell my client a hosted SharePoint environment in a "private cloud." Actually, what they were really selling to the client wasn't cloud-like at all. They quoted a single physical server, hosted in their data center, running VMWare's ESX Server. The server was to host three virtual instances of Windows Server 2008, each running a portion of a SharePoint farm (though with barely enough physical memory to run the farm effectively). The details of the implementation and, indeed, portions of the management, were still in the hands of the client, even though the vendor supplied the data center, leased the hardware, and setup the machines. I’m not sure about you, but this strikes me no different than what this same vendor called "managed hosting" just last year or even five years ago.

While there's still some debate about whether a private cloud is actually a cloud at all, there are several key cloud ingredients this vendor’s solution lacked, namely:

• Elasticity: growing or shrinking based on demand
• On-demand: available when you need it
• Dynamic provisioning: the bit that enables elasticity

(In fact, both Microsoft and Amazon offer private cloud solutions -- Amazon's virtual private cloud and Microsoft's Azure private cloud or SharePoint Online for SharePoint -- that should represent the benchmark for comparison.)

Our SharePoint research points out examples where Microsoft overloads terms or provides less-that-crystal clear definitions, sometimes with partners following suit. This partner's approach to selling a solution certainly pushed some boundaries. While most vendors don't purposely mislead, they are always looking for the edge over their competition. It requires extra due diligence on the part of you the customer to understand what you're truly being sold.

In reality, we’ve seen a lot of enterprises who held off upgrading to Office 2007 from 2003.  However, many of those same organizations moved ahead with SharePoint 2007 implementations for any number of valid reasons. Whatever the case, the version mis-match is real and potentially challenging as those same customers consider skipping Office 2007 and heading straight for 2010.

Witness, for example, the following error -- when I clicked "NEW" from a document library view:

It just so happens that I have a SharePoint 2007 application, but I'm running Office 2010.  Interestingly, this is the same error you might get if you're running anything other than MS Office or on a MAC.  Other integrations between Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 -- like the Shared Workspace tool pane and basic document management functions do work properly -- but clearly some functions do not.  If you go searching for other challenges related to "unmatched" Office and SharePoint versions, you're likely to find that this issue isn’t the only one plaguing SharePoint users.

As readers of our SharePoint research know, specific versions of Office and SharePoint are not inherently incompatible.  However, as with any set of independently developed tools (even from the same vendor), there is a bit of "buyer beware" to the implementation.  As such, test careful your scenarios before any mass roll-out; you may be surprised at the results.

As subscribers to our SharePoint Watch research know, the platform presents several important challenges to licensees.  SharePoint is somewhat weak in centralized administrative controls (fine grained controls aren't universally available for things like security), and management capabilities essential for larger organizations often require 3rd-party add-ons. Of course, these shortcomings will get worse if SharePoint spreads virally within your enterprise.

That said, firms must also take responsibility in implementing proper governance policies that normal humans can understand and apply; too often organizations create draconian and inaccessible governance plans or simply leave users to their own devices. Both situations create more harm than SharePoint's own provisioning management issues.

SharePoint is weak in some areas and strong in others.  However, this is one place where I tend to side with Martin White, of Intranet Focus. He once remarked that SharePoint, more often than not, points out an information management issue that most firms didn't know they had because they weren't managing their information prior to implementing SharePoint. 

This begs the question: will SharePoint 2010 enjoy the same success as 2007, or will it collapse under its own weight?

One of the earliest criticisms of SharePoint was that it took a simplistic approach -- simple in implementation, simple in use, and catering only to simpler scenarios.  In fact, it was this straight-forward and focused approach that lay behind SharePoint’s early success. 

While SharePoint 2003/2007 didn’t solve every problem, it did a respectable job at providing accessible collaboration and document-sharing services at a time when competitors were underinvesting in those features. The strategy was so successful that some competitors have begun to use the same approach; c.f., Google Docs and Sites.

Over time, however, Microsoft has layered more functionality on the original core.  Most of the functionality has tried to address two shortcomings:

1. Requests from largest enterprise customers and major integrator partners for greater depth, and
2. Disconnect between Redmond's marketing of SharePoint as an omnibus information-management platform and significant functionality gaps in the package itself

Microsoft came to envision SharePoint as more than just a "product." It would become a platform upon which many more applications could be constructed. This has generated enormous enthusiasm in SharePoint's ample partner channel, but the strategy comes with real costs on the ground.

Case in point: recently a client came to me looking to overhaul their intranet.  They talked about social networking, document management, search, and integrating legacy applications -- all of the features you might expect in a modern intranet environment.  They asked whether SharePoint might make a good fit.  I presented how SharePoint could solve many of their needs, but the dizzying array of features and functions in SP 2010 can (and in this case did) lead to overstimulation and ultimately participant shut-down.

Now, maybe I could have presented SharePoint more clearly. But SharePoint 2010's ability to address so many challenges -- like finding content, surfacing key performance data, or assisting with document lifecycle management -- makes the platform so vast, that it’s a challenge to describe it in a coherent and meaningful way for business decision-makers.  While basic document management capabilities remain very accessible, trying to describe, for example, the interplay among documents, content types, and enterprise metadata management takes great patience, both on the part of the consultant and the client.

Subscribers to our SharePoint Watch research will understand that while certain features of SharePoint are "simple," the platform is anything but simple.  Customers should take the time to develop specific usage scenarios prior to diving in.  My client was understandably interested in generic features, but a large, complex platform like SharePoint will overwhelm those who don't invest in specific use cases.

It was precisely the sort of end users attending my presentation who were responsible for SharePoint's early success.  Unfortunately, it seems as if Microsoft may have forgotten that.

Even venerable software vendors and sometime Microsoft competitors like OpenText, EMC | Documentum and WebTrends have been announcing integrations with the latest version of SharePoint.  What’s telling is not the integrations, since many of these vendors have had some sort of integration since the 2007.  What’s interesting is how quickly the latest offerings for 2010 have been released. 

Our SharePoint - Enterprise research stream offers advice about how to navigate this vast ecosystem, along with a growing number of evaluations of 3rd-party modules.  With the release of 2010 and more vendors getting into the SharePoint act, buyers will want to do greater diligence when choosing the nearly inevitable add-on or supplement to SharePoint functionality.

Two years later, Microsoft’s Business Productivity Suite Online (a combination of Exchange, Communications Server, SharePoint, and LiveMeeting) continues that trend.  Unfortunately, SharePoint hasn’t changed much in those two years and the 2010 version of SharePoint Online will likely be an evolution, not revolution, in Microsoft’s SaaS offerings.  As a result, it was both surprising and predictable that a vendor like Bamboo Solutions announced its own entrance into the SaaS SharePoint world. 

Bamboo, a long-time provider of add-on Web Parts that we evaluate in our SharePoint ecosystem research, is now getting into the hosted SharePoint business.  Bamboo’s initial push is around their Requirements Management suite.  Bamboo says they plan to roll out other "online applications." In fact, the next is slated to be a version of their project management suite, PM Central (which is currently for sale for on-premise installations).

Bamboo’s announcement raises two questions: 1) why would a software company tied closely to a Microsoft product get into the SaaS business, and 2) why not partner with Microsoft around SharePoint Online or BPOS?  The answers: this is what Microsoft partners do and Microsoft encourages it.

There’s a long-held Microsoft strategy that says Microsoft builds the platforms, while partners create solutions.  Redmond's broad partner ecosystem means that customers don’t have to wait for Microsoft to solve a problem, since there are thousands of independent software providers and system integrators that will gladly build a solution on top of a Microsoft product.  And partners are more than happy to produce add-ons to products marketed by the Redmond software giant, since it’s a relatively low-risk investment -- at least in the near-term.  Bamboo, in particular, has been a stalwart in the SharePoint space since 2003 ; they entered as a low-cost provider of Web Parts and the company has grown extensively over years into more packaged applications and suites (which are essentially a collection of various Web Parts in any case).

The answer to the second question sheds light on Microsoft’s constant struggle: resolving their long development cycles with the ever changing world of Software-as-a-Service.  In the SaaS business, 24- to 36-month software releases are too long.  It’s more the norm to update your solution once a quarter, with each update infinitely smaller than the "big bang" releases we typically see from traditional software vendors.  When I asked Steve Ballmer, during the last SharePoint conference, about what Microsoft is going to do to change their development practices, his less-than-stellar answer was (paraphrasing here), "...it takes as long as it takes to develop software." Enter Bamboo with their own data center, their own provisioning system, and their own experience about how to create multi-tenant SharePoint-based applications.

As a customer, you must evaluate any product to ensure it meets your needs.  You also have to exercise caution signing on with any software vendor -- such as Bamboo -- who suddenly decides they're in the services business.

In the end, though, evaluating SharePoint is much more than assessing just what comes out of Redmond. Depending on your level of investment in the platform, you'll want to understand what's coming out of the myriad vendors that support Microsoft’s products.  SharePoint is rarely a solution in and of itself; it’s the SharePoint ecosystem that provides the end product.

Google's announcement today that it will allow Docs users to store other files inspired a fresh round of speculation in twittersphere about competition with SharePoint. File-sharing is essential to the modern enterprise, but storage alone doth not a collaboration application make.

Before that, Google made a big media push to promote their Sites application. The resulting coverage brought another round of "SharePoint Killer" claims. Most of these claims have been effectively critiqued. As my colleague Alan Pelz-Sharpe points out, Sites is hardly a SharePoint killer and Adriaan Bloem gets deeper in discussing the broader application of Sites.

But let's back up for a moment. The real issue at hand is not whether Sites or Docs or Wave or HyperOffice can kill SharePoint, but rather can these tools (SharePoint included) stand up to the demands for which software makers market them?

If you ask any three consultants, you'll get five answers regarding the definition of an intranet. Most average folks in medium and large organizations could probably give you a quick definition that goes something like this: "an intranet is a place where employees go to get information and resources necessary to do their jobs." While this broad definition could be applied to many applications, you'll typically see the following in a basic Intranet: forms for various benefits, links to key services (and applications), and places to store simpler organizational content (e.g., holiday schedules, policies and procedures, and so on). For these basic services, SharePoint Services/Foundation, Google Sites, and HyperOffice can meet many needs, especially among smaller enterprises. However, if this is all organizations needed for intranets, Microsoft, IBM and OpenText would not have spent billions on developing more enterprise-centric products.

To better understand the very broad and deep needs organizations have for employee productivity, look at Jane McConnell’s Global Intranet Trends Report and Nielson/Norman’s Intranet Design Report. Through the lens of both reports (and others), we begin to see what organizations are not only doing today, but will do in the next couple of years -- and the vastness of that marketing/reality gulf becomes very apparent.

Some of the functionality available within SharePoint Server (forthcoming successor to MOSS), IBM WebSphere, and other large-scale portal offerings are unavailable in more basic solutions like SharePoint Foundation (free successor to WSS) or Google Sites. For example:

• Personal Sites/Spaces
  Some enterprises want to provide each employee with an individual space in an intranet. These spaces are usually controlled exclusively or semi-exclusively by the employee and mimic the personalization features we might see on the internet (think iGoogle).
• Business/Social Networking
  One key aspect of many intranets today is the ability to connect employees from across the organization together. IBM, Microsoft and others have invested in developing solutions that connect one employee to another. In SharePoint, there’s a feature that helps you connect with people within your own team (common manager), within the same distribution list (through Exchange) and through other contacts (like LinkedIn).
• Enterprisewide Search
  No one is happy with their Intranet search engine, but Google's hosted services are no closer to solving this problem than the on-premise search tools of its enterprisey competitors.
• Composite Application Frameworks
  Beyond the ability to create "simple" sites that collect content and allow employees to share data, many vendors are investing in the ability to create composite applications. Composite applications are a collection of features or functions for more than one application in the enterprise, brought together in a singular interface. In Web 2.0 speak, you’d call them a “mashup,” but composite applications are becoming increasing important in organizations that want to give portions of enterprise applications to a much broad audience. For example, combining a product lookup from SAP with sales lead data from SaleForce.com.

Subscribers to our SharePoint Research will know that it's only at the fee-based level (MOSS and Server 2010) where SharePoint can begin to satisfy broader organization needs. And even then, the results can be uneven. At the same time, products like Sites and HyperOffice, as well as SharePoint Services/Foundation, only touch a small percentage of an organization's needs, let alone address concepts like governance, security, and collaboration. Small businesses can cobble together lightweight hosted services effectively. Larger enterprises need to take a more holistic view. Do you need an apple or an orange?

From the first keynote to the last session, Microsoft made sure everyone saw the improvements.  Executives like Jeff Teper and Tom Rizzo, product team members like Arpan Shah and Paul Ryan Duguid, and numerous MVPs all demonstrated various changes in the platform.  Steve Ballmer called SharePoint "his favorite product."

But now that the dust has settled it's time to analyze the details.  In a special Advisory Paper for our SharePoint research customers, we describe eight important new improvements and eight significant continuing shortcomings.  As a sample, here's one each from our list of pros and cons:

Pro: New Web Interface 

Microsoft has invested heavily in a new AJAX-based web interface.  The typical "SharePointy" blue, post-back heavy and static "L" navigation layout has been mostly replaced with amore glassy interface, "web 2.0" interactivity, and a slightly different navigation orientation.  For content contributors, they'll find the Office ribbon has made its way into the web.  It still remains unclear whether the new SharePoint 2010 interface will confuse less technical users, but for the more technically inclined administrator or power user, the improvements are mostly welcome.  All this aside, the biggest boon is the new rich text editor, which is finally compatible with more than just Internet Explorer.

Con: File Size Limits 

SharePoint -- or more precisely SQL Server -- has had a limit of 2 Gb size for any single file in the repository.  Unfortunately, the limitation still exists.  Some might respond that 2 Gb is a very large file and very few organizations will even hit that limit.  However, consider the construction industry, pharmaceuticals, media, or even technology firms.  All of these industries have common use cases where dealing with files larger than 2 Gb is a requirement.  Further, these files need to be kept and managed with content commonly stored in SharePoint.  We had held out hope that the newly revamped Remote Blob Storage (RBS) might eliminate this constraint, but it does not.  We listened enthusiastically as Microsoft discussed their new tiered storage for offloading SharePoint content to less expensive storage, but it failed to compensate as well.  In the end, perhaps Office/SharePoint "15" will fix it.

Do you want to receive more in-depth coverage of SP2010 as we continue to filter field reports and experiment more with SharePoint ourselves?  Go here to subscribe to our SharePoint research for a year, or here to download a report that gives three months’ access to all updates.

It seems that Google has taken a page from Microsoft's playbook in trying to "encourage" usage of Chrome, Firefox and Safari, while making use of IE challenging without "plug-ins." Perhaps Google's goal is to be more like Microsoft, not supplant them in the collaboration space.

The latest Microsoft SharePoint conference is nearly here. Microsoft has been saving all of the biggest announcements about the upcoming 2010 release for this conference. Clearly, based on the more than 7000 registrants, it appears that the latest version of SharePoint has caught everyone's attention (having the conference in Vegas probably didn't hurt either).

As in past, I'll be at the conference reporting on all things SharePoint. Be sure to catch the blog entries and tweets from the conference floor.

If you happen to be attending the conference, I would love to hear your experiences with SharePoint in your organization. Alternatively, e-mail me (shawn_shell<at>consejoinc.com) or send me a tweet (@shawnshell) with your feedback.

I agree with my colleague Adriaan Bloem in asking the question: is Ontolica 4.0 really a major release or just repackaging bits that have been in development -- on and off -- for the better part of two years.

As readers of the SharePoint Report 2009 may discover, SurfRay was removed from our reviewed vendors in the SharePoint ISV ecosystem. While we’ve never included a significant number of vendor reviews in the report, SurfRay’s financial instability and the inability to bring product to market required their removal. It now remains to be seen whether they can compete with other search add-on vendors who have continued to innovate without same business woes. The history of SurfRay would suggest otherwise, but as Tony Byrne quipped: old software never dies...

I don't want to suggest that there aren't viable competitors to SharePoint. Far from it. There are a number of very good tools that have similar functionality. However, as a consumer you need to do your homework and ensure that you're choosing the tool for the right reason: it meets your business requirements. This is true whether it's SharePoint or Alfresco (which has also been positioned as a "SharePoint killer").

To illustrate my point, take Hyperoffice. Their Google ad (run on an article about SharePoint) reads "Why Pay for SharePoint... Affordable SharePoint alternative... " Hyperoffice does provide document sharing, e-mail integration, calendaring (both personal and group), as well as task management and forums (among a number of other features). I especially liked their task management functionality, since it included the concept of a project. Hyperoffice also provides the ability to view their repository through Windows Explorer or the Mac finder, which provides basic Office integration (though not anywhere near SharePoint's integration).

But with all of these features, it is really a "killer" or a true alternative? No. Hyperoffice, in particular, was careful to use the word "alternative" instead of killer. However, their idea of an alternative only addresses Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) functionality. Some features were stronger than WSS and some weaker, but their pitch ended up being about price. The problem? WSS does not have a license fee. Further, their tool does nothing for organizations that need the more robust features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). While they give you the facilities to share lots of different kinds of information, this approach is a far cry from a true enterprise intranet -- even for small and medium organizations.

SharePoint's success is in fact partially attributable to the fact that it covers such a broad array of functionality and can be "bought" in many difference configurations. Is every function best-in-class? No. However, Hyperoffice (and firms like them) make the same mistake that many organizations make with SharePoint: they provide a bevy of features and hope business users will figure out what to do with them; it's another "build it and they will come" fallacy.

Readers of our SharePoint Report 2009 will know that SharePoint is more than just the collaborative features found in WSS. In our research, we turn a critical eye to the value in the MOSS additions and the ecosystem that surrounds SharePoint. However, you should be suspicious of vendors who are marketing themselves as an alternative or a "killer" (especially those who use the "price" argument). These alternatives may have equivalent features or may be superior for specific use cases, but you still need to evaluate them objectively. In many cases, I suspect you'll find the "killer" isn't anything of the sort.

Figure 1 - New "six pillars" image for SharePoint 2010 -- Source: Microsoft

To start, you should realize that virtually every term previously describing SharePoint has changed; this may be part of a larger program to reposition the new version of SharePoint or simply a way to change the conversation. Significantly, Microsoft has completely removed of the word "portal" from the SharePoint vocabulary. Not only has Microsoft removed the word from the product name in 2007, they've now removed it as a pillar. In truth, "portal" is an overloaded term and generally not descriptive. Microsoft's did not seem to directly replace it in the new diagram. However, SharePoint is definitely Microsoft's portal platform, and it's curious what marketing messaging will develop around the new version in this respect.

The next big change is the removal of the term "collaboration." Readers of the SharePoint Report 2009 know that collaboration, defined broadly, is both a strength and weakness of the current release. In the 2010 timeframe, Microsoft is using the term "communities." Clearly, Microsoft seems to want to present a stronger social media story, perhaps addressing the existing collaboration weaknesses (at least in terminology). The community term also seems to be related to the new "sites" pillar, which implicitly was a part of the collaboration pillar in the 2007 platform.

In addition to the changes in terms, you may also notice a new pillar concept -- "insights." In early 2009, Microsoft announced licensing changes for their PerformancePoint server product. The change allowed SharePoint Enterprise CAL licensees to leverage the BI platform for no additional charge. In the 2010 timeframe, Microsoft is directly integrating certain functions of the old PerformancePoint platform directly in the product. BI has historically been a weakness of SharePoint. It's now obvious that Microsoft is working to both improve function and the conversation around BI in SharePoint.

There are other changes in the diagram, all pointing to a new way of thinking at Microsoft. It's unclear how these language changes will manifest in the product. What is clear is that they're shifting from broad categorical descriptions to a slightly more functional orientation. Whether or not these changes help to influence improvement in the new product is still an outstanding question.

As SharePoint 2010 draws near, I can't help but think that perhaps the sheer number of both licensees and add-on solutions, collectively represent a penny under each wheel of the SharePoint train. 100+ million licenses and thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) clearly represent a SharePoint strength. In fact, the platform has become so popular that a few colleagues of mine suggested awhile back that perhaps SharePoint had effectively ended the great debate about what portal platform to buy.

If you were to poll most organizations, they would prefer to implement newer technology over older if given the choice. However, this is only true when they have little or nothing invested in the older technology. If you ask organizations the same question, after they've invested a great deal in the older technology, they might have the desire to implement the newer technology, but not the stomach; it's just too painful to think of all the work that would have to be "redone."

Now back to our proverbial train: will the 100 million SharePoint licensees and thousands of SharePoint add-on vendors prevent SharePoint 2010 from getting out of the station? Or will 2010 represent the next round of massive SharePoint adoption? As the SharePoint Report 2009 points out, there are quite a few vendors out there who support SharePoint and 2010 could be a terrific boon to organizations hoping to see more from SharePoint. However, if you've read the Enterprise Portals Report you also know that SharePoint isn't the only game in town (in case you needed reminding).

If organizations are going to spend significant time and money upgrading to 2010, why wouldn't they also consider alternatives?

As readers of the SharePoint Report 2009 know, web content management is not a real strength of SharePoint. Given the challenges we've heard from customers --multi-lingual management, ease of content entry, reuse challenges, accessibility, and so on -- I'll hope that Microsoft will share their own experiences with the rest of us, and perhaps inform improvements in the upcoming SharePoint 2010 version.

Here's what I heard, directly or indirectly, from the attendees:

Most attendees "owned" SharePoint through an existing licensing vehicle like an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft. In about a third of the cases, this created an advantage for SharePoint when evaluating portal products (I've heard this described as, "we already own SharePoint, so why not use it"). However, it was also occasionally true that these same organizations also owned other content management products. One enterprise in particular owned (and used) BEA and RedDot, but decided to replace both products and implement SharePoint after a full-blown evaluation, assisted by Prescient Digital. While Oracle's Stellent tools (now a part of Oracle's Universal Content Management suite) was attractive (WestJet preferred the content contribution features of Oracle UCM), the cost difference and overall functional breadth were in SharePoint's favor.

Larger organizations are struggling with real or perceived scalability challenges. One attendee was rolling out My Sites to 50,000 employees. While technically possible (Microsoft has nearly 100,000 in their environment), the global nature of the implementation, performance limitations related to content database sizes, and site collection limits within a SharePoint applications were causing them headaches. Microsoft is public about both hard and soft SharePoint limits, but larger enterprises will have to plan and architect carefully to create the right solution.

Some attendees were surprised by the file size limits in SharePoint. Here again, Microsoft has been public about size limits (see previous bullet), but with more and more organizations dealing with rich media (or simply very large files), a 2 Gb restriction is a real constraint. To be sure, the issue is actually the result of a BLOB size limitation in SQL Server. Unfortunately, SharePoint is only compatible with SQL Server, so you can't simply use another database platform to avoid the limit. Interestingly, Microsoft has a "solution" to this problem, which was first introduced in a hot fix and then later through service pack 1. They called it the "External BLOB Storage provider." Unfortunately, this feature got little to no public visibility. In the latest "Inside SharePoint" on TechNet, Pav Cherney discusses how to take advantage of this "new" provider to create an external storage mechanism for SharePoint. You can also read more technical detail about the provider in Todd Carter's blog as well as on Clever Workarounds (a.k.a., Paul Culmsee); neither blog author has a lot of positive things to say (apart from initial excitement at the possibilities), but I agree with them that it was a promising step forward -- if perhaps only a half-hearted attempt.

SharePoint is not a favorite for public-facing website publishing. The truth is that SharePoint has some serious shortcomings in the WCM space, but if you're using SharePoint elsewhere in your enterprise, I think it should be considered (assuming you don't have complex requirements). However, SharePoint's deficiencies in the WCM category were never more obvious than after seeing Web Idol contest. WCM vendors like eZ, Ektron and SilverStripe did 6 minute demos of their tools in semi-real life scenarios. These demos highlighted that Microsoft will have to really get in the game if it hopes to compete in the WCM space. From user-friendly, AJAX-driven contribution interfaces to impressive unstructured content import capabilities, it seems as if Microsoft has been asleep at the WCM wheel.

Subscribers to our SharePoint Report 2009 know that SharePoint is not a best-in-class tool in many categories. Our research also delves into some important considerations and gotchas if you want to roll out SharePoint across the enterprise.

At the same time, SharePoint benefits greatly from Microsoft licensing deals with existing customers, it's sheer breadth, ease of use and it's unbeatable (almost) integration with the Office products. Combine these attributes with what is probably the largest ISV, developer, and customer communities of virtually any player in the broad portal space, and you have a powerful incentive to consider SharePoint as a part of a portal solution.

While I'm hoping the upcoming 2010 version will improve the overall platform, I can't help but think that there's still a lot of room for improvement. Unfortunately, even Microsoft doesn't have nearly enough time, money, and/or resources fill in all of the shortfalls. If there was ever a time where other vendors have a shot at wresting SharePoint out of the catbird's seat, it's now.

Microsoft will often change product names from version to version; clearly to create distinction in the market, but occasionally as the result of moving products from one Microsoft team to another (as happened with SharePoint). 

However, in this case, the announcement suggests that the disappearing "Office" moniker was confusing to customers because they associated it with the client software.  Unfortunately, the resulting name change for SharePoint will be the third brand since its inception: SharePoint Team Services changed to Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server changed to Microsoft Office Server and now to simply Microsoft SharePoint.

What is more of a challenge though, is the continued confusion that customers already have with the name SharePoint.  It’s associated with both server-based and client side products.  On the server side, there are three versions of SharePoint to choose from: Windows SharePoint Services, Office SharePoint Server standard and Office SharePoint Server enterprise.  While Microsoft may not make as many distinctions, each of these SharePoint products is distinct; this is especially true when you have to pay for licenses.  In fact, this brand confusion is precisely why we spend time in the SharePoint Report, and at various conferences, explaining the various SharePoint versions and where they fit in the Information Worker universe at Microsoft.

Going forward, my hope is that this latest name change will help reduce confusion and not add to the existing SharePoint brand complexity.  However, I have a feeling that not a whole lot will change; customers will continue to be confused by what their Microsoft reps are talking about.

The Portalogiks newsletter asked both an implicit and explicit question: what if the average end-user downloaded, installed, and began using SharePoint Designer on their sites? Could this create a mess for the IT departments of these affected companies? The answer is: very probably. Even the clients I spoke with were nervous, without the benefit of seeing the Portalogiks newsletter.

As described in the SharePoint Report 2009, governance is a continual struggle for organizations large and small. In fact, SharePoint is famous (deservedly or not) for creating governance nightmares in enterprises that do control its use. Our research further describes how SPD can very deeply and irreversibly customize SharePoint sites. At least the for-fee license model prevented the casual SharePoint user gaining unfettered exposure to the tool; customers could simply limit access to SPD and thereby enforce some sort of governance over SharePoint customization. (Of course, as our research customers know, there are other governance challenges to address around browser-based configuration and Visual Studio-based customization as well.)

To make matters worse, there are few controls within SharePoint that would disable just SharePoint Designer access without disabling legitimate customization access. SharePoint's permission model works relatively well for content. However, security is not as granular as an administrator might want when facing the task of trying to disable SPD. Since SPD access uses the same mechanisms as the rest of Office, disabling SPD would disable the Office clients like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. In addition, the ability to customize aspects of the SharePoint interface does not distinguish between SPD and the web client interface. It is true that administrators can limited customization access by user, but it's likely that organizations might want to enable certain customizations through the web interface, but limited SPD to the same community of users.

If you're the administrator of a SharePoint environment, I would recommend you get a handle on where SPD is currently installed and lock down the remaining workstations in your environment. Remember, you still have one remaining foothold on your environment: group policies through Active Directory. Beyond that, I would carefully review what permissions are granted to existing users; anyone who doesn't explicitly need to customize SharePoint should have their permissions trimmed as much as reasonable.

To be fair, this governance situation is not entirely Microsoft's to resolve. Enterprises need to take responsibility for their own governance program. They have to create, monitor, and evolve how, what and where SharePoint is used in their user community. This involves actually developing policies and enforcing them. However, where Microsoft has failed their licensees (and one continual weakness in SharePoint) is in not giving administrators the tools to properly control the SharePoint infrastructure.

• Available in 19 markets (check with Microsoft for specifics)
• Five language versions (check with Microsoft for specifics)
• Multiple data center locations for hosting customers will be provisioned in the data center nearest to their "ship to" address

Clearly Microsoft is making progress in enabling their collaboration platform outside of corporate firewalls. The one big case study they promoted was GlaxoSmithKline, who has committed more than 100K employees to the program, with 80% receiving the full compliment of services including Exchange, SharePoint, and Office Communicator (IM). About 20% of Glaxo's employees will be using what Microsoft calls the "deskless suite," which provides a subset of functionality including Exchange access through Outlook Web Access (OWA) and a combination of read-only and read/write access to portions of SharePoint.

While the announcement highlights encouraging moves on Microsoft's part, the SaaS offering continues to suffer from the same general short comings highlighted in the SharePoint Report 2009. During the conference call, we didn't hear any new information on how Microsoft is addressing the challenges identified during the 2008 SharePoint conference (a year ago). Namely, how does Microsoft handle the deeper customizations of SharePoint (that most customers want to make) in their cloud environment? For example, how are custom site definitions handled? Can you deploy Web Parts unique to a given customer (an increasingly common case)? What about the 3rd-party add-ons that Redmond now promotes as part of its ecosystem strategy?

Somewhat predictably, the answer from Microsoft is "Office 14," or, in other words, customers in this environment can expect to wait until well after the launch of Office 14 until those kinds of issues are resolved (if at all). If we assume that the official launch of SharePoint vNext will happen at the end of 2009, it's likely that SaaS customers won't see the update until 3 to 9 months after that.

Sure, customers can opt for a dedicated server and have SharePoint hosted on that environment as a managed service rather than true SaaS. However, doesn't that just transfer a potentially underutilized set of hardware from the customer's data center to a Microsoft-run data center? Where are the saving and the efficiencies gained?

While I very much applaud Microsoft's efforts, I am still disappointed with their "cloud" progress. It's very clear that their strategy will lag behind their product releases and heavily dependent on the architectures of those products -- which today are largely not suited to a cloud environment. In an era of "just in time" updates to products, you have to ask how prepared is Microsoft to support a SaaS environment? Will they continued to be hampered by their relatively slow product development cycles? Clearly these criticisms aren't new, but it's curious why Microsoft hasn't address them in the year since they launched their cloud offerings.

This article represents, for Microsoft, the first "real" attempt to demonstrate how SharePoint might leverage the CMIS spec. While the specification was released last year by the likes of Microsoft, IBM and EMC, no real guidance was given by Microsoft regarding how this would impact SharePoint (in fact none of the vendors gave any guidance on how this specification would directly impact their product architectures).

It now seems that Microsoft will approach CMIS like it approaches many mid-product cycle changes (i.e., industry trends, new product acquisitions very visible request from customers): it hires external agencies or individuals to work with product team members to build a demo.

I haven't dug deeply into the samples or the actual implementation, but it looks like a decent start. The authors take time to explain the various elements of the sample and how they play both into the CMIS specification and SharePoint. They address many of the scenarios one would expect: basic access to content outside of SharePoint, managing metadata, searching external data, and running a workflow. It's unclear if they've adhered to best practices in every case (e.g., can you add an existing site column to the new external document library), but it's not bad.

There is a lot more to say about this particular sample and I will continue to report on it. However, if you own SharePoint and have the need to represent a single view of content across several content systems, you may want to review the article and the code. As SharePoint Report 2009 readers know, it's possible -- but not certain -- that Microsoft will use such an approach to construct a commercially-ready version of this integration.

Thank you to Andrew Connell for publishing a blog entry pointing to the MSDN article.