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SharePoint: Is the Analogy to the PC the Right One?
At the Microsoft SharePoint conference in October, Steve Balmer likened the current state of SharePoint to the early days of the PC market. Microsoft is following their standard gameplan for product success of blending the elements of a highly programmable environment with rich developer tools and a well-recognized User Interface. Using this criteria, comparing SharePoint to PCs reveals similarities.
Balmer fully recognizes that in the near term that SharePoint is not ready to land a strong blow to Open Text, EMC and IBM high-volume, transactional and process-heavy enterprise solutions. But that’s not what they’re targeting initially. Microsoft is following the same path that SQL Server took. Because developer tools for SharePoint are easy to use,
the platform is attractive to departments and groups with limited resources. Microsoft is targeting “the many applications companies build with one man year or less of development.” Microsoft development tools let even non-programmers dabble and build small applications that can fill the needs of small groups.
It is very likely that the world will see a lot of SharePoint applications developed over the next five years. And many of those applications will be considered as successful in fulfilling the needs and requirements of small groups. But is that a good thing? When viewed from the enterprise level, administration of many different departmental solutions can become unwieldy, not unlike the problem of managing data by spreadsheet rather than via a central database.
Ultimately when a company sees the benefits of providing a centralized approach to data management, the challenge will be to pull together many highly-customized SharePoint worlds into a single unified view.
