Real Story Group. Make Better Technology Decisions.

SharePoint is widely considered Microsoft's most successful enterprise offering. It has become an almost ubiquitous component within enterprise information management architectures, and a seemingly pervasive topic of enterprise conversation -- even among those who don't license the platform.

Yet, SharePoint licensees generally concur that the platform's native social networking services are merely adequate to severely lacking. Moreover, SharePoint's notions of collaboration services tend to emphasize document-oriented use cases at the expense of discussion-oriented applications like collective ideation.

SharePoint licensees seeking to deliver on the promise of social networking and more advanced collaboration applications must therefore choose among three alternative approaches to close the gap: complement, supplement, or extend. Each alternative carries specific benefits and demerits in terms of cost, time to market, long-term adaptability, mobile enablement, user experience, external access, and other dimensions. This briefing examines the pros and cons to help you make the best decision.

It's a fact of business life that software vendors sometimes go out of business or vendors sunset their products. This actually happens less than most customers fear, but when it does happen, the results can range from damaging to catastrophic. Therefore, a prudent customer will monitor key technologies and suppliers for potential problems. Fortunately, a failing vendor or product will exhibit telltale signs of coming failure. Led by RSG founder Tony Byrne, this webinar will share ten key "early warning signs," so you can conduct your own risk mitigation accordingly.

Back in the 1990s, there were a few thesaurus management tools available, mainly created for librarian types. This was long before taxonomies and ontologies became popular concepts in the business world. However, as corporate requirements for search and content management have intensified, the market has grown for tools that help organizations create, administer, and publish semantic structures. You can now find multiple, fully featured taxonomy tools, and many have expanded over the years to address additional requirements, such as search enhancement and text mining. Taxonomy management tools are now less of a spreadsheet replacement and more of a key player in an end-to-end solution for tackling content organization challenges.

Recently we have seen large enterprise buyers considering Box alongside Microsoft SharePoint. Just a year ago, SharePoint was practically the sole contender in light document management situations; now the situation has changed quickly and dramatically. With heavy investment funding, Box is rapidly positioning itself as a SharePoint contender, going so far as posting a billboard in Silicon Valley stating, "Box.net vs SharePoint -- Sharing should be simple. Challenge us..."

But is Box.net really a SharePoint killer? If not, what does its rise tell us about how enterprises are (and are not) utilizing SharePoint?

With rare exceptions, most enterprises do not employ business software "out of the box." Rather, they create applications. Applications are a specialized implementation of a piece of software that achieves a particular business purpose, and they are critical to obtaining value in your specific business environment. However, creating applications requires development expertise, time, and funds. Applications also require configuration management: the process of synchronizing and testing multiple concurrent changes. Yet even with testing, bugs and instability frequently haunt them. SaaS (Software as a Service) and cloud-based services obviate only some (but not all) of these challenges.

It's been over 10 years since we first came across SharePoint and so much has changed in that time. Changes both in terms of the products, but also in terms of buyers and market expectations. Alan believes that SharePoint is approaching something of a crossroads, one that users of the platform may be more aware of than Microsoft and its partner channel. The times they are a-changing...and SharePoint has evolved in ways nobody could have expected. The competition, meanwhile, is far from rolling over and giving up. In fact it has adapted remarkably well. Who is buying SharePoint in 2011, why are they buying it and when might this Microsoft steamroller of success finally begin to run out of steam?

When you or your software vendors provide mobile access to business applications, there are two broad choices:

1. Create downloadable applications (or mobile apps) that are optimized for different device/operating system combinations.
2. Create web-based applications (web apps) that target a broader mobile population of browser-enabled devices.

Proponents of web-based apps claim that technologies such as HTML5 will make mobile apps obsolete. There is merit to this argument, but it's not completely valid. Both approaches will continue to coexist, and therefore you need to decide which approaches are suitable for your scenarios. This paper helps you make these choices.
Download this advisory paper here.

SharePoint's licensing structure has always been complicated, and with new variants and options, SharePoint 2010 is no exception. Moreover, with the advent of BPOS and its successor Office 365, you have recourse to new deployment options with distinct licensing models.

Depending on which version of SharePoint you deploy, the licensing cost can range from nearly zero to hundreds of dollars per seat. This is because Microsoft sells several versions of SharePoint, but each version is packaged with different capabilities and licensing schemes. If you don’t understand the varieties, you'll only get half the story.

As a buyer, in order to budget for SharePoint accurately, you need to assess the various levels and deployment options carefully.

It's a fact of business life that software vendors sometimes go out of business or vendors sometimes sunset their products. This actually happens less than most customers fear, but when it does happen, the results can range from damaging to catastrophic. Therefore, a prudent customer will monitor key technologies and suppliers for potential problems.

Fortunately, a failing vendor or open source project will exhibit telltale signs of a coming failure. By identifying these signs as a customer, you can conduct your own risk mitigation accordingly. This paper identifies ten potential warning signs and offers an approach to distinguish between simple technical or business hiccups, and potentially serious trouble. It includes a simple quiz for you to rate likely risk levels among your key technology suppliers.

Today we published two new advisory papers that address critical questions around what technologies you should consider for your public website.

• Should you use SharePoint 2010 for your public website?
• Should You Employ the Same Web CMS Tool for Public Sites and Intranets?

SharePoint has become ubiquitous across enterprises for collaborative document sharing. However, despite the large volumes of documents that have been created, managed, and stored in SharePoint environments, records management (RM) requirements rarely have been addressed properly. In fact, many customers complained that MOSS 2007 lacked robust or credible RM options, but SharePoint 2010 has seemingly addressed many of these concerns. Download and read the full Advisory Paper here.

Requests for Information (RFIs) will help you gather information to make better decisions, and eliminate suppliers that cannot or should not be working with you. Download the advisory paper here.

We've added a new vendor to our "SharePoint Ecosystem" research under the BPM and Workflow category. Download the Global 360 chapter here.

In July 2010, Microsoft released a connector as part of the SharePoint 2010 administration toolkit. This briefing critically assesses integration opportunities using CMIS in the SharePoint context.

The complete deck from our 06 April Webinar. Download here.

We just updated our SharePoint Ecosystem research with evaluations of three Microsoft search partners. Download here.

Please join us for a free webinar, "What's so special about SharePoint?" Register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/475355985. The webinar will be archived for SharePoint Watch subscribers.

We are presently completing research on third-party tools to supplement SharePoint in the areas of Search and Social Computing / Collaboration. Look for the updates before the end of March, 2010.

New advisory paper contrasts SharePoint 2010 Search with FAST Search services. Download the paper here.

New briefing provides specific advice to enterprise customers navigating contemporary content technology marketplaces.  Download here.