Social-enabling SharePoint: A Critical Review of Three Major Alternatives
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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.