Introduction to SharePoint
SharePoint represents many different things to many people, including people in Redmond. Microsoft has not always known what to do with the product, how to describe it, or even how to sell it. But one thing is sure: Microsoft has struck a mother lode of opportunity, and now seeks aggressively to exploit it with the latest version of the product.
What began as a simple collaboration utility in 2001, and morphed into a portal product in 2003, has become – at least in Microsoft’s eyes – a full-blown information management platform. Together, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) are not just a content management system, knowledge management system, or portal, they’re just “SharePoint.” SharePoint has become a central server platform for Microsoft, a venue for integrating basic Office products as well as various other Microsoft enterprise applications in a single environment.
At the Microsoft-sponsored SharePoint Conference 2008, Bill Gates shared that Microsoft had licensed more than 100 Million seats to the platform and generated more than $US 1 Billion from that. To be sure, many of those seats fall under enterprise license agreements and may not reflect actual usage, but even if a fraction of those users actually logs into SharePoint each day, clearly it makes for the most significant – and fastest growing – information platform on the market today.
However, what remains less clear more than a year after the launch of SharePoint 2007 is where the product actually fits into the enterprise. SharePoint is truly a collection of individual components that interact together to varying degrees, but require extra work to weld into a cohesive package. And unfortunately not all components of SharePoint are created equal. In other words, SharePoint is well suited to some requirements, but certainly not all.
Nevertheless, it's possible to evaluate SharePoint in terms of eight business services it offers:
- Collaboration Services
- Enterprise Content Management Services
- Web Content Management & Publishing Services
- Portal Services
- Business Intelligence Services
- Forms and other Process Services
- Enterprise Search Services
- Application Development Services
The CMS Watch SharePoint Report is designed to help both Business and Technology Managers figure out where and why and how to apply SharePoint to solve their information management problems – and where there is a need to seek alternatives instead. Our aim is to provide you with an independent and unbiased guide to what works and what does not, when to leverage SharePoint, and when to avoid using it.
To learn more about enterprise search and review an independent evaluation of 28 search vendors, consult the Enterprise Search Report.