Proceed Cautiously With SharePoint 2010, Analyst Says

The final release of Microsoft's SharePoint 2010 is expected soon -- before summer, according to independent analyst Janus Boye -- and customers and integrators have been preparing for months for this very ambitious product.

Microsoft has a lot riding on this version of SharePoint, according to Boye, because some SharePoint customers already feel like they've been burned twice by Microsoft with the previous two SharePoint releases -- once in 2003 and once in 2007.

"They've had two hard upgrades ... and customers are saying to them, 'Are you serious about it this time?'" Boye said.

But Microsoft's upper management -- right up to CEO Steve Ballmer -- says the company is serious about SharePoint, so DevX writer Deborah Gage asked Boye what customers should expect from the new software. This interview is edited for clarity and length.

Q: What's your advice on adopting SharePoint 2010?

A: Don't do it automatically. It's a tremendously popular product because it's bundled with Windows and Office, so for any organization considering a collaboration tool or a new Internet platform, Microsoft is always there saying, "SharePoint can do this, and you've already paid for it."

Organizations don't like to hassle with multiple vendors, tools, contracts, and salespeople. So when Microsoft says "SharePoint does this and this," many blindly adopt it, and some are unpleasantly surprised later on about how much the product is more like a toolbox than a complete, out-of-the-box final solution. There's always been a lot of customization and integration and implementation with SharePoint, since the very early releases.

Also SharePoint 2010 has been nationally marketed -- this is the most marketing I've seen in 15 years or so -- but there's a wide disconnect. From a buying perspective, it can be hard to separate what's marketing and what's the product. Microsoft has been making a lot of big promises -- there are new things they want to do in 2010 that they haven't done in the past.

Q: What are some of the most significant changes Microsoft has made in this release?

A: It's hard to say because this release is so broad and does so many things. Microsoft is making it more friendly towards developers. Developers have always been an important strategic audience for Microsoft. Microsoft is grabbing the attention of an enormous ecosystem of partners - the implementation cost of SharePoint is three to five times higher than the license cost, and Microsoft hands that over to partners -- but still, with SharePoint Studio and SharePoint Designer, they're updating versions of the programming language, and that will excite developers.

From a business user's perspective, SharePoint adds social computing features. Microsoft didn't get (social media) right in 2007, and they've done a lot to try to improve it. So with blogging and wikis and other social media features, SharePoint now has more natively in the product, so users don't have an urgent need for third party applications.

Q: For customers already using SharePoint, how difficult is this upgrade going to be?

A: With SharePoint 10, the upgrade is not technically as difficult, but SharePoint is so much more widely adopted in enterprises - in the Department of Energy, for example, or Coca Cola. Organizations like those are creating five to 10 new SharePoint sites a day, and they may have 15,000 or 20,000 SharePoint sites used across department collaborations. Some may not be used anymore because the project is long completed. But if there's no governance in place and if you've not thought about how to let this product spread in a good way, a planned and controlled way -- which rules do I have, who do I allow to use it, do I delete it or alert owners - it will be much harder.

It's about non-technical things. It's also a problem because SharePoint is a platform or toolbox. If you go into two big organizations, both say they're using SharePoint but there are almost no identical SharePoint installations. Everybody has implemented it differently and uses five or 10 or 20 third party tools. So the upgrade will be much more difficult because it touches even more parts of the organization. It will require more planning.