Thursday 6 December 2007

Out on the SharePoint Frontier

According to CMS Watch:

"although Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 brings improved collaboration facilities over previous editions, it comes at the cost of a dearth of enterprise management services, leading to rampant, viral proliferation and instances of uncontrolled content, as well as major compliancy risks."

Hmm. It all sounds very familiar - if you've been around intranets long enough, you'll remember people like Gartner warning us about "wild west intranets" back in the late 1990s.

But are they really wild or is just a matter of perspective? More on this another time...

3 comments:

  1. Hi James,

    I was having a very similar conversation the other day with James Robertson at Step Two (following an intranet workshop session run by James).

    To echo your words, the general gist of that conversation was that SharePoint use is growing unabated through a need for collaboration. Yet, in most instances, there's a lack of strategy and organization which could mean a big chaotic mess in a few years time, that needs redesigning.

    The question I've been thinking about is, should there be a framework (strategy) around which to cultivate such growth (of SharePoint et al) and provide loose structure, or, should you simply try to find a way of making use of such chaotic information and knowledge that's created and inherent?

    Would be good to know your thoughts on this.

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  2. The question is always how do we control, should we control, and more importantly why is this so viral? Generally things are viral because they are new, simple to use and easy to provision. We only have to look at folders and files on network file servers, application growth in Lotus Domino environments, and now SharePoint (and others). As a collaboration person it is great to see widespread adoption, with an information management hat you'll have a different view!

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  3. Anonymous7:49 am

    I scraped a post together out of this and a couple of others that popped up at about the same time!

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