SharePoint: A bunch of apps loosely joined?

In an interesting commentary, Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet discusses whether MOSS 2007 is the next big operating system from Microsoft. "Although Microsoft is not fond of calling out the six or so servers that comprise Office SharePoint Server, it is a bunch of server apps loosely joined," she writes, comparing SharePoint to the many popular loosely joined Office products (e.g., Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook). According to Foley, "Microsoft is attempting to make SharePoint the new, must-have platform for its business users". As readers of the Enterprise Portal Report know, MOSS 2007 is indeed many separate products, with Web Content Management being just one of them. Despite forceful marketing from Microsoft, our recent research suggests that many projects dramatically underestimate the complexity of MOSS 2007 implementations beyond simple collaboration scenarios. Integrating products has always been tough and with the new version of SharePoint, project cycles appear to be significantly longer than with previous versions.

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