New studies highlight the potential downsides of SharePoint
Category Microsoft
From All About Microsoft: New studies highlight the potential downsides of SharePoint
I find it rather interesting that SharePoint is being accused of the same problem that Microsoft accuses Notes of... proliferation of applications in an out-of-control fashion.
SharePoint is one of Microsoft’s crown jewels. Microsoft is touting the fact that SharePoint generated $1 billion in revenues for Microsoft last year. At Microsoft’s recent Worldwide Partner Conference, company officials said they expect partners to generate $5 billion in SharePoint-related services revenues for themselves in the coming year.
But it’s not all roses on the SharePoint front — especially when it comes to the growing trend by customers to use SharePoint not just as a set of loosely integrated applications, but as a development platform in its own right. A couple of new studies highlight the potential risks of which customers should be aware when betting big on SharePoint.
The Forrester report includes some pithy warnings about the potential risks of uncontrolled growth of customized SharePoint applications. From the report’s executive summary:
“(A)s many shops are discovering, SharePoint is also a development platform that people both inside and outside of IT use to create intranets, outward-facing portals, electronic forms, workflows, and even dashboards. The promise of SharePoint: Your organization will be able to create and deploy collaboration applications faster and give businesspeople productive new tools. The pitfalls: SharePoint can add new unplanned demands as your teams fill the product’s gaps in application life-cycle management and enterprise integration and as they create policies to prevent a new chaos of usergenerated applications.”
SharePoint’s customizability and rich feature set is a blessing and a curse for many customers. Forrester noted that “SharePoint is a pure Microsoft server stack that closes off any opportunities to substitute third-party databases, Web servers, and other products for Microsoft components,” Forrester cautioned. In addition, the Enterprise Edition of SharePoint, which includes many of the advanced app-development features, “can add $200 per user to your budget,” the report’s authors noted.
With power comes responsibility... Yes, your users *can* create their own Notes and SharePoint applications. And yes, you will have a number of them that will be built in a haphazard fashion, become mission-critical, and end up back in the hands of IT to "support". Unfortunately, that what happens when you make something that can be "programmed" without programming. It happened with Access, it happens with Notes, it will continue to happen with SharePoint.
And then, IBM will be touting a conversion package to move SharePoint apps to Notes/Domino, because only about 15 - 20% of the SharePoint applications in your organization are actually used. The rest are abandoned or obsolete... <only slight sarcasm there />
From All About Microsoft: New studies highlight the potential downsides of SharePoint
I find it rather interesting that SharePoint is being accused of the same problem that Microsoft accuses Notes of... proliferation of applications in an out-of-control fashion.
SharePoint is one of Microsoft’s crown jewels. Microsoft is touting the fact that SharePoint generated $1 billion in revenues for Microsoft last year. At Microsoft’s recent Worldwide Partner Conference, company officials said they expect partners to generate $5 billion in SharePoint-related services revenues for themselves in the coming year.
But it’s not all roses on the SharePoint front — especially when it comes to the growing trend by customers to use SharePoint not just as a set of loosely integrated applications, but as a development platform in its own right. A couple of new studies highlight the potential risks of which customers should be aware when betting big on SharePoint.
The Forrester report includes some pithy warnings about the potential risks of uncontrolled growth of customized SharePoint applications. From the report’s executive summary:
“(A)s many shops are discovering, SharePoint is also a development platform that people both inside and outside of IT use to create intranets, outward-facing portals, electronic forms, workflows, and even dashboards. The promise of SharePoint: Your organization will be able to create and deploy collaboration applications faster and give businesspeople productive new tools. The pitfalls: SharePoint can add new unplanned demands as your teams fill the product’s gaps in application life-cycle management and enterprise integration and as they create policies to prevent a new chaos of usergenerated applications.”
SharePoint’s customizability and rich feature set is a blessing and a curse for many customers. Forrester noted that “SharePoint is a pure Microsoft server stack that closes off any opportunities to substitute third-party databases, Web servers, and other products for Microsoft components,” Forrester cautioned. In addition, the Enterprise Edition of SharePoint, which includes many of the advanced app-development features, “can add $200 per user to your budget,” the report’s authors noted.
With power comes responsibility... Yes, your users *can* create their own Notes and SharePoint applications. And yes, you will have a number of them that will be built in a haphazard fashion, become mission-critical, and end up back in the hands of IT to "support". Unfortunately, that what happens when you make something that can be "programmed" without programming. It happened with Access, it happens with Notes, it will continue to happen with SharePoint.
And then, IBM will be touting a conversion package to move SharePoint apps to Notes/Domino, because only about 15 - 20% of the SharePoint applications in your organization are actually used. The rest are abandoned or obsolete... <only slight sarcasm there />