Silver Spring, MD, USA -- SharePoint 2007 customers are increasingly turning to Microsoft partners to provide capabilities where the platform either lacks or underperforms, according to research undertaken by CMS Watch, a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies.

"After initially marketing SharePoint as a virtually omnipotent platform, Redmond is now emphasizing partner-oriented solutions," notes CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne. "On the whole, that's a good thing, but customers need to prepare themselves to deal with multiple vendors and solutions as part of their SharePoint architecture."

These findings come from CMS Watch's The SharePoint Report 2009, a 241-page evaluation of SharePoint from an enterprise perspective, assessing its suitability for nine different business scenarios and evaluating twenty-two software partner offerings across eight categories:

• Search
• Web Part Collections
• Imaging & Capture
• Archiving & Records Management
• Backup & Disaster Recovery
• Workflow & BPM
• Social Software
• Administration & Management

The report also found:

• The broader SharePoint ecosystem also includes consultants, trainers, and systems integrators, but enterprises should note that many of these firms bring fluency in only one or two of SharePoint's nine core services.
• Microsoft is actively planning the next major SharePoint release ("Office 14"), and if history is any guide, the company will replicate in the platform many of the services provided today by partners, potentially limiting the long-term value of enterprise investments in 3rd-party solutions.
• Redmond's community-source CodePlex effort offers another approach to supplementing native SharePoint services, but CodePlex projects appear to have less energy and support than traditional open source projects.

"We are witnessing the evolution of SharePoint from a product to a platform to an ecosystem," notes CMS Watch principal, Alan Pelz-Sharpe. "Enterprises investing in SharePoint need to develop a broader strategy that takes into account this wider, more complex landscape - and our goal is to help you do just that."

The SharePoint Report 2009 is available for purchase and download at /Reports/SharePoint/.