CMS Watch SharePoint Feed

White paper on SharePoint for public websites

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 2 Jul 2008 11:07:00 -0400

We've critiqued SharePoint's rather awkward web publishing capabilities in different evaluation reports (on Web CMS tools and SharePoint itself). But we also see customers who seek to deploy SharePoint for their public websites, either because they want to experiment with the platform, or because the business side is being forced to use it (often under the misimpression that it will be "free").

The latter case is a bit ironic, because for years some enterprise web teams had to put up with bloated Web CMS tools from the likes of Documentum or IBM in a mistaken effort by IT to overreach and standardize on a single ECM supplier. Now we sometimes see IT throwing SharePoint over the wall to the business as almost a kind of abdication of any involvement.

But using SharePoint for traditional web publishing is not a trivial undertaking. If you go that route, I'll commend you to a very useful white paper published by our partners at J. Boye, which offers some best practices in deploying SharePoint for web publishing. If you've already decided to take the plunge (or someone has decided for you), "Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites - A Business Person's Guide" can help you sort out how you should (and should not) proceed.

Some of the advice is germane to any web publishing automation effort, but that's exactly the point: whatever its unique particularities, employing SharePoint does not suspend the need for essential project management. If anything, the complexity of the platform and array of implementation choices puts a premium on dotting your i's and crossing your t's.

Web CMS Thoughts from Gilbane Day One

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:48:00 -0400

After participating in the first day of the Gilbane San Francisco conference yesterday, here some short observations in no particular order.

By my count, once-little Ektron has seen four years of hyper-growth. The company says they now have 200 employees. If accurate, I'll guess this head-count puts them at about US$30-40m in revenues, which sizes Ektron in the ball-park of some of the larger standalone Web CMS vendors (like FatWire, or Tridion before the SDL acquisition), or even the CMS product groups of some larger vendors. You're probably not surprised to hear that Ektron customers tell us this growth has not come without associated growth pains.

Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz, who once worked on SharePoint Portal Server 2003 at Microsoft, called the MOSS 2007 platform a "collection of festering boils." You can ask him for clarification, but he seems to have meant it with love...

Speaking of SharePoint, two channel partners told me that their local Microsoft reps were marketing MOSS for public websites really hard. Evidently Redmond wants to beat the rap that the tool is not ideal for public-facing sites, and doubtless would like to lengthen this customer list. So the integrators are asking themselves, "when Microsoft hands us a great lead to follow, how can we have a candid conversation with the prospect about their real alternatives?" Not a new story in the channel business, but a pressing one right now, and you the buyer should understand the institutional dynamics. See, this presents you a bit of a dilemma as well: ideally you'd find a vendor-neutral consultant to help you sort out your choices, but if MOSS wins your competition in the end, you really want to go with a partner who brings very deep skills in Web Publishing in SharePoint, because it's not a simple beast. If Redmond keeps pushing its partners, then "vendor neutral with very deep SharePoint skills" could become an oxymoron.

If the exhibit hall is any indication, the Web CMS marketplace continues to expand, especially at the lower end -- perhaps dispelling the myth of a SharePoint steamroller, at least in this space. Smaller vendors here -- some of whom have participated for multiple events now -- include Acumium, Bridgeline, Broadchoice, Hippo, Telerik, and The Level, plus many of the other usual suspects we cover in our Web CMS Report 2008.

Of course, exhibitors come and go from year to year. One thing doesn't change though. Despite all the talk about Web 2.0, a lot of customers bring some very basic questions they want addressed about web publishing and CMS tools. I hope I can answer some of them at my tutorial tomorrow.

Is SharePoint the end of (portal) history?

shawn_shell@consejoinc.com(Shawn Shell) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:16:00 -0400

In one of my university political science classes, we had to read and review a now famous essay by Francis Fukuyama titled "The End of History?" In the essay, Fukuyama argued that the apparent victory of modern liberal democracy over totalitarianism in the aftermath of the Cold War effectively marked the end of the ideological evolution of forms of government.

As I speak with more and more clients, I'm struck by the parallel between the essay's main argument and SharePoint (don't laugh...there's more). In much the same way Fukuyama suggests a resolved debate on forms of effective government, SharePoint seems to have halted virtually every conversation about alternate portal technologies. When speaking with my colleagues, Steve Krol, Exec VP of Services at Lyons Consulting Group, and Tony Byrne, CMS Watch founder, it seems they're seeing much the same thing. In fact, Steve went as far as to compare SharePoint to Kleenex, Band Aid, and Xerox -- no one installs "portals" anymore, they install "SharePoint." This begs the question: does SharePoint represent the end-all of portal products?

Whether you agree or disagree, it is certainly true that more and more customers are looking at SharePoint before anything else. With 100 million seats licensed and $1 bn in sales, it's hard to argue that SharePoint is anything but successful or mainstream. Consider that companies like Accenture, Ford, Del Monte, Mary Kay, and Hawaiian Air (to name just a few) all use SharePoint (some internally and some externally). Still many others are migrating there.

Of course, SharePoint owes some of its success to Microsoft's Enterprise Agreement approach. Most customers with Enterprise Agreements that include the "core CAL" get end-user licenses for SharePoint included (the actual server license is actually trivial in the scheme of things). In addition, the Windows SharePoint Services component is a free download and, although it depends on SQL Server, a basic implementation can use another free tool -- SQL Express. However, this approach is not much different than open source platforms, or products from other vendors like Oracle or IBM that might give away some portions of their portal product in exchange for customers buying the broader platform.

As our SharePoint Report 2008 points out, the product is quite broad. It can, among other functions, support: a composite application framework, document collaboration, web content management, and a broad enterprise portal. Still, you'll really want to do your homework before assuming that SharePoint can solve your portal problems. Just because you get something "for free" doesn't mean it really is free.

And like any product, it is certainly not the end-all. SharePoint does not shine in records management, it provides only basic document management, it lacks digital asset management, while search (at the enterprise level) usually requires add-on products to deliver full value. In addition, SharePoint partially suffers and partially benefits from a very broad partner community -- some customers like the fact that SharePoint is well supported by 3rd parties, but many also feel that Microsoft should have included more of that functionality "in the box."

Is SharePoint the "End of Portal History?" Not likely. The end of the Cold War did not mark the end of political history. It just suspended some discussions and changed some others. SharePoint has clearly caused a disruption in portal conversations in many organizations. The real question is whether SharePoint deserves this kind of attention. I think it does. Just exercise suitable caution: all portals, regardless of vendor, raise tricky issues of data integration, identity management, and application usability. (Some conversations, it seems, never go away.) In the end, you must truly understand SharePoint and your needs before dismissing other solutions in the portal space.

Microsoft Releases Latest SharePoint Extensions and Improves Developer Experience

shawn_shell@consejoinc.com(Shawn Shell) — Fri, 6 Jun 2008 20:21:00 -0400

Microsoft recently announced the latest version of the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (v1.2). This announcement is significant in that, among specific improvements in and to "out-of-the-box" projects, Redmond has added support for Visual Studio 2008. For those of you actively developing on SharePoint, this update to the extensions means, among other things:

No more "hacking" to use VS 2008
Until the 1.2 extensions, developers were reduced to "community" solutions for leveraging VS 2008. Some of these community-developed solutions worked, but they were not supported by Microsoft and lacked the fit and polish of a commercial release.
The ability to fully utilize .NET 3.5 (which provides native AJAX extensions)
The latest version of the .NET framework has been out for some time. However, SharePoint developers couldn't really take advantage of the update, since VS 2005 only supports .NET 3.0 (we can split hairs about how much SharePoint support there is with this extensions release, but that's another blog topic). With the update, the facilities in the new framework are now effectively available to SharePoint developers, including having the AJAX framework built into .NET (although official support for AJAX within SharePoint doesn't really exist).
Silverlight support (at least from Visual Studio's perspective)
As mentioned in a previous post on the SharePoint conference, Microsoft has been demoing more and more Silverlight-based Web Parts in SharePoint. Both Andrew Connell and Robert Bogue have been hosting a series of SharePoint online sessions that, in part, cover Silverlight-enabled Web Parts. For highly interactive Web Parts, Silverlight may be a better option than AJAX, since SharePoint doesn't natively support AJAX.
Improved project diversity
There are additional project types added to SharePoint development, including custom fields, modules, and templates. In addition, two project types (content types and list definitions) include stubbed Event Receivers.

As the SharePoint Report 2008 points out, the SharePoint developer experience needs some improvement. Specifically, there were historical problems with the 1.0 extensions that Microsoft released. The 1.1 extensions fixed may quirks, but didn't significantly add to the project types available and failed to support the latest Visual Studio version (even though the release dates were relatively close). With the 1.2 release, it seems Microsoft has regained its development footing and has started moving the ball forward again.

All this said, there were some disappointing news within the announcement. Remote development is still not supported. One could argue that remote development has never been a strong suit of Microsoft's server products; most products, including previous versions of SharePoint, Content Management Server, and BizTalk all required developers to have a local copy of the product installed. However, as the SharePoint development community expands and more customers adopt the platform, I question whether it's reasonable to expect every developer to host their own SharePoint server. I know of at least a few customers who don't want developers arbitrarily spinning up servers on their network and don't have the network support bandwidth for a half-dozen new servers just for development.

In all, the new extensions take a step forward, but the developer community is left still wanting more...

FAST clarification

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Tue, 3 Jun 2008 09:43:00 -0400

Apparently, when I previously wrote about Carrie's hand reaching out from the grave, the metaphor was too subtle. So let me make it absolutely clear: I'm not hoping the FAST turmoil will "just go away" so I won't be bothered by it anymore. I was pointing out the fact that the consequences could be further reaching than it being "just another investor soap", and the acquisition of FAST by Microsoft won't be enough to bury it.

Now that I've ruined the joke by explaining it anyway, let me add that this is no laughing matter. Of course, while it is much more fun to ridicule the situation without having to be able to back it up, I'll have to stick to the known facts: FAST is under investigation by the police. By stating just that, I estimate the readers of this blog to understand this as a serious warning.

When I say I'd rather discuss the technology, again, I imply rather then explain (to do a good job of that takes quite a few pages). So let me explicitly state some of the questions arising.

Now that FAST is turning out to be more of a Tucker Torpedo than a Cadillac (and to quote Wikipedia: "[Tucker's] Accessories Program raised funds by selling accessories before the car was even in production"): what is it Microsoft actually bought?

Customers (who were, it now seems, fraudulently overvalued, and many of which are on the Linux platform), whom Microsoft probably won't support in the long run?
Street-cred in enterprise search, which is now seriously marred by the consistently negative reports about FAST, compounded by suspicions that MS may have once again been blinded by competition with Google?
A vision on enterprise search, in the form of a vice president of Enterprise Search possibly implicated in a police investigation?

These have been widely reported, and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot more of value that came for Microsoft's $1.2 billion than technology. Which is what prompted my widely misunderstood remark that I'd rather discuss just that piece of the puzzle. Surely, it would have been possible to acquire the technology at a friendlier price point, say $23 million (oh wait! they got that as a free bonus), but it raises enough questions on its own. Which parts of ESP aren't third party, bought, or open source? How would these be integrated, or will a separate product line emerge? What are Microsoft's long-term views on enterprise search?

I've criticized Microsoft's unclear strategy and roadmap for MOSS in the past, and once again, Redmond seems to be covered in fog. Since search solutions are written off in years, not months, knowing what future development holds for the software is very relevant to existing and prospective customers. I'd think twice before investing in an implementation until the clouds subside.

On a side note, kudos to Dave Kellogg for being the first to actually respond to my previous post under his own name. I received a fair bit of anonymous mail on this subject, and it seems paradoxical to be criticized for not speaking out loud enough by those who choose to remain incognito themselves. Though this post is not about Dave, as much as his post is not about me, I would like to point out that my name contains three A's (not two), and I'm not a 20-something English major. Yes, CMS Watch does have maps and charts, and no, we don't dismiss business problems -- we just prefer not to place too much emphasis on the intricate details of GAAP accounting procedures on this blog...;-)

CMS Watch Competition Winner

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 2 Jun 2008 09:45:00 -0400

You may remember a while back we launched our little competition to come up with a new name for our vendor positioning chart. We had some great (and varied) responses from all over the world. And it took quite an internal debate to decide on the eventual winner, but decide we did. And the winner is...Laurence Hart who offered us the name "Cross Check." Laurence, a bottle of champagne is yours.

Over the next month we will continue working with our designer to revamp the chart, and of course to rename it -- so look out for the Cross Check in all our report updates this year.

Talking SharePoint at the Enterprise-3 Conference

shawn_shell@consejoinc.com(Shawn Shell) — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:40:00 -0400

I just returned from the IIR's Enterprise-3 Conference in San Diego. It's an interesting conference for consultant and end-user alike, I think, because it brought together people interested in a variety of related topics, from Portals, to Collaboration, to Web Content Management (WCM), to Social Software.

Of course, SharePoint touches all those spaces, and so for the first time the organizers ran a full day of pre-conference seminars on SharePoint (I taught the morning segment). These pre-conference seminars were well attended with individuals from all different enterprise types -- not-for-profit to government to Fortune 500.

It seemed virtually everyone at the conference was talking about SharePoint -- wondering if it would be "right" for particular business scenarios. I was glad to be there and offer some examples, but if you are looking for a resource on this topic that's readily available at your desk, you can turn to our newly published SharePoint Report 2008. In the report we examine SharePoint's true "fit" against eight different scenarios for which Microsoft has suggested the platform handles.

In San Diego, the questions we fielded were most frequently centered on web publishing. The SharePoint Report has a whole section specifically on WCM -- highlighting where SharePoint could be a good solution or where you might want to pursue another tool. In addition, our Web CMS Report has fantastic comparison tables to enable you to make a good comparative decision regarding your WCM tool choice.

I would encourage you to download the sample content from the various reports and check out what others are saying about them.

Vendor criticism of CMS Watch

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:43:00 -0400

As you know at CMS Watch we write critical product evaluations to help you avoid expensive procurement and deployment mistakes. We write reports that detail both the warts and merits of big vendors like EMC, Oracle, Xerox and IBM -- through to smaller specialist vendors like Hyland, Autonomy and Nuxeo. Readers of our reports often ask me "what did vendor x say when they read that!" The assumption, sometimes correct, is that vendors freak out on reading such criticism.

In an industry whereby most of the "independent analysts" are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be "independent" of, it's unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats -- if something is truly terrible we will tell you.

But most of the time it is not a case of bad technology versus good technology. Rather it is a case of good fit versus bad fit: a product that could become an outstanding performer in a larger legal firm may make a terrible fit in a mid-sized manufacturing and ERP-centric environment. Hence we urge you the reader to study all the alternatives and balance them out, rather than look at one preferred vendor in isolation.

Speaking of isolation, the marketing groups of some vendors seem to operate in in a kind of vacuum. I guess it's part of the job for them to drink their own Kool Aid, but some of them seem to think it's part of their job to attack and stop any criticism of their product or company. At CMS Watch we're often on the receiving end of that wrath; that stinks sometimes, but so be it. Just as it is the vendor's job to wax lyrical about the joys of their product, so too is it ours to unearth the reality. If you want to get an insight into this particular dynamic, whether you're a curious end user or a vendor AR (Analyst Relations) person, check out the article I published today.

Budget time: How much should I set aside for software licenses?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Sat, 3 May 2008 17:14:00 -0400

When budget-building time comes up, many technology customers face the interesting question of how much money to put aside for new software licenses. Even without looking at specific vendors, you might have to tell your manager some ballpark figure for expected license costs.

As an analyst I'm frequently asked about license prices. A recent interesting discussion among peers challenged my views and provided helpful feedback that might assist you in arriving at the right numbers in today's marketplace:

List prices aside, buyers can presently obtain significant discounts on enterprise portals and on Web CMS tools. This may be caused by the increased SharePoint infiltration. A commentary in February on big software discounts and recent numbers from Vignette seems to confirm this trend. SharePoint licensing for websites is the exception that proves the rule. In general if the Web CMS comes from an ECM vendor, it will be more expensive -- potentially way more expensive

With enterprise search at the high end, the reverse is true. The marketplace is seeing strong demand at the moment. Many enterprise-tier search offerings come only as a bundled offering, so there is little list pricing to benchmark against. Deals quickly run into the millions of Euros in large, global, and complex enterprises.

Among the huge array of mid-market vendors across different content technologies -- many them local/regional in footprint -- you can typically find solutions that meet the needs of even organization-wide deployments in most enterprises, but at a factor of five (or more) cheaper than the higher-end solutions

If you are willing to serve as a reference client or appear on the customer list -- or better within a press release -- this is very valuable for the vendor and should help you to get significant discounts. (And of course as you look to evaluate vendors and they provide such testimonials, you should also understand how this game is played.)

Remember that enterprise deals entail complex negotiation and pricing models that ultimately boil down to what the salesperson thinks you can afford. Perhaps needless to say, but still: Implementation costs are higher than licensing costs and open source projects are not necessarily cheaper just because you might save licensing costs.

Thanks to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Apoorv Durga, James Robertson and Martin White.

So you say you want collaboration?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 2 May 2008 15:22:00 -0400

Everybody wants improved collaboration, but how, and towards what end? Or as we asked quite intently in our SharePoint Report 2008, what kind of collaboration?

Those questions came to mind during Martin White's keynote at the Intracom 2008 conference (which was quite vibrant, btw) in Québec, PQ, Canada earlier this week.

Martin's keynote offered many gems, including several cautions about social software in multilingual environments. Most social software applications assume the primacy (and at some level even the replacement) of written communication over oral. This of course raises all sorts of cultural issues, but perhaps more importantly: non-native speakers who may comfortably listen and speak in a second or third tongue may not feel proficient enough to write in a foreign language. Of course, sometimes the opposite is true. But the broader point -- that electronic collaboration systems can redistribute interaction patterns in a potentially random way -- still stands.

The part of the keynote that particularly interested me was Martin's description of different kinds of teams: communities of practice; formal workgroups; project-specific teams; informal networks. Each has its own rhythms and needs.

And what are those teams actually doing? Well, there are different types of collaborative tasks, ranging from problem-solving, resource-sharing, status-tracking, and quite a bit more.

This analysis might seem obvious, but I think is terribly important, because it gets to the heart of collaboration / social software when that technology assumes the broader mantle of "Enterprise 2.0." At an enterprise level (and beyond) you will find quite diverse collaboration and networking requirements. The smart enterprise invests in finding out what its employees' really need, and will actually use, before investing heavily in new tools.

Archived SharePoint Webinar

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:49:00 -0400

If you couldn't make the "Evaluating SharePoint from a Business Perspective" webinar we conducted last week in conjunction with the folks running the Enterprise³ conference, you can review an archived version online here (for a couple of weeks, anyway). Questions, comments, criticisms welcome; just e-mail me.

Thoughts on SharePoint and FAST Search

shawn_shell@consejoinc.com(Shawn Shell) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:11:00 -0400

In our SharePoint Report 2008 we discuss SharePoint's shortcomings and strengths in the search space. While SharePoint 2007's search capabilities have been improved over the 2003 product, it's still not "enterprise class" for a variety of different reasons.

Clearly Microsoft saw this same shortcoming (both in SharePoint and it's overall search offerings) and announced that they were going to acquire enterprise search vendor FAST Search and Transfer (more information on FAST can be found in our Enterprise Search Report 2008).

For SharePoint users, this brings up a few opportunities and issues. In a previous blog post about the SharePoint conference, I highlighted the presentation that FAST employees gave. This presentation showed nifty new Silverlight-enabled search Web Parts. These Web Parts demonstrated several capabilities that FAST brings to the SharePoint world, like: content spotlighting, multimedia search, and taxonomy management.

The last capability is one that I believe would be particularly interesting for SharePoint users, since taxonomy management represents a challenging area for most SharePoint implementations -- SharePoint taxonomies are very rigidly based on physical structure of the SharePoint sites and leave little flexibility for a more logical taxonomic structure (Redmond folks would argue that the content query Web Part might help, but it's not a solution). That said, what Microsoft hasn't really provided is good guidance on what users can expect to see and any migration path between SharePoint search and FAST. Unfortunately, that really hasn't changed: Microsoft hasn't released any roadmap for FAST's integration, though you could argue it's still early.

That aside, what could the FAST acquisition mean to SharePoint customers? Here are a few of my thoughts:

The FAST acquisition was officially completed today. This is a good thing, since Microsoft can now get down to the business of integrating the company's technology with the rest of Microsoft's products. However, it's not clear what, if any, impact this acquisition will have in the very short term. Judging by the Groove acquisition, which preceded the SharePoint 2007 release by some months, an acquisition after the release will not yield any updates in the core product until SharePoint vNext (probably around 2010 or so) and beyond. However, I'd be willing to bet that some elements of the demo given at the SharePoint conference make their way to sites like Codeplex or as free downloads on Microsoft's site.
The former CEO of FAST will assume the role of VP of Enterprise Search. His responsibility will include all search products: SharePoint search, Search Server Express and FAST ESP. So I guess the "Enterprise Search" moniker might need to be removed or rewritten on the SharePoint search page; FAST is, by far, the new "enterprise" search product at Microsoft. What's interesting here is that Microsoft has historically brought Office-related technologies under one roof; just look at what happened to SharePoint specifically -- that product was once its own product group. As they integrate FAST, it would appear that this announcement suggests Microsoft might break out search into its own dedicated team and make SharePoint a "customer." This opens up the possibility of decoupling SharePoint from any particular search technology -- perhaps a pipe dream, but we can always hope.
In a blog entry on the Enterprise Search blog, Microsoft stated that the FAST offering will continue its Linux and Unix support. The blog entry was quick to reinforce the message that Microsoft does not want to support or wish to invest in Linux or Unix solutions. While they would like to "delight a core part of FAST's customer base," they are openly hoping those customers will convert to Windows and .NET. This does call into question whether this Linux/Unix support will be long for the world. In the short term, however, Microsoft can boast a better product from which to launch a play to be a real contender in the enterprise search space; see our related blog entries and article on FAST here. In the long term, Microsoft will have to come to grips with the fact that enterprises will continue to leverage non-Windows technology and if Microsoft wants to benefit from that revenue, they should consider continuing FAST's support for those technologies (their recent earnings announcement, and the subdued guidance for the year, may reinforce that message).
Microsoft won't support SharePoint on Linux <gasp!>. This is probably not a surprise to anyone who is even vaguely familiar with Microsoft. However, the fact that FAST (currently) is supported on Linux may introduce greater content aggregation and, certainly, search capabilities within SharePoint. Let's hope that Microsoft sees it that way.

In general, the FAST acquisition, for SharePoint, will likely have little impact short term. Over the longer term, it's clear that the Office 14 version of SharePoint will be substantially improved in the search area (depending on the SharePoint product team's willingness to implement the new technology). I would personally like to see some add-ons in the near term, since that would improve search within organizations that may have both tools.

Stay tuned for more on this topic as the integration progresses.

SharePoint, accessibility, and web standards

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:22:00 -0400

Our new SharePoint Report explains how one of the core challenges with the platform -- dating from inception through to MOSS 2007 -- is that the needs of a collaboration service often conflict with the requirements of other information services, particularly around website publishing.

One example: like many other portal vendors, by default MOSS wants to insert a lot of extra code and non-standard mark-up on every page to create an interactive collaboration dashboard. As this MSDN brief on how to performance-tune a MOSS 2007 WCM site warns, "Office SharePoint Server, by default, is not XHTML compliant." This has manifold implications for website publishing, not the least of which is accessibility.

Can you fix this? Yes, with an experienced developer carefully going into the innards of the tool at various levels to replace code. Not particularly friendly.

Of late, Redmond has been touting its "Accessibility Kit for SharePoint." At least one avid researcher points out that the fix remains incomplete. (Link thanks to Martin White.)

As Web CMS Report readers know, some competing web content management packages quietly suffer the same problem. At least with SharePoint you can read all about it publicly. But Microsoft casts a huge shadow on this space, and their relative disregard for core web standards just lowers the bar for everyone else.

Join a free SharePoint strategy webinar

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:48:00 -0400

We participate regularly in the semi-annual Enterprise³ Conference (former Portals and Collaboration Conference). The next event, in San Diego, CA in May, covers a wide range of topics, mostly around the nexus of Portals, SharePoint, and Social Software. Jarrod and I will both present on a number of topics (e.g., Facebook).

As a pre-cursor to the event, I'm leading a free one-hour webinar, "Evaluating SharePoint from a Business Perspective," on Thursday, April 24, 2008 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT. Use the "CMS" priority code when you register. Hope you can join in!

Love Your Local Data Warehouse Manager

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:35:00 -0400

Within most enterprises, the worlds of "data" and "content" remain far apart, despite recurring business needs to converge different types of information. Tony Byrne argues that data specialists have a lot to teach content specialists -- and vice-versa. The trick is finding common ground, allied interests, and a common vocabulary...

Readers' challenge - name our new chart!

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 17:11:00 -0400

Since moving to the US in 2002 I have become a fan of The Atlantic magazine, and in particular the last page of each edition that contains the "Word Fugitives" column. In this column readers ask for new words to meet commonly demanded needs.

For example, in the most recent issue somebody requested a polite but meaningful phrase for a couple to use when they are trying to conceive a child. My favorite of the suggested responses came from Laura Whitman, of Redwood City, Calif., who wrote, "In our group when a couple is married and everyone is wondering what their plans are in regard to procreation, we always ask if they are in the product research or product development phase...early product development refers to your correspondent's criteria." You see there is always somebody out there with the right answer.

So to our current challenge, we have designed a wonderful (in our own opinion) chart that provides buyers of technology with an at-a-glance risk/opportunity review of the products we cover in a particular segment. We refer to this currently as the Vendor Risk Report -- and internally as the "VORP" (Vendor Opportunity and Risk Profile). Not exactly terms that roll off the tongue. Now some of you may be aware of similar chart like products from other firms, charts that have catchy names like "Magic Quadrant" or "Wave." Well we want a catchy name too but haven't thought of a satisfactory one.

So in the spirit of Word Fugitives, we are throwing the door open to you. Please send me your thoughts and ideas and we promise to publish and credit the best of them here on the site. And for the very best one we will send a box of gourmet chocolates or bottle of good champagne (your choice). The gauntlet has been thrown down, can you rise to the challenge?