I've noticed in the Lotus community how some members are opening up to Sharepoint, or at least acknowledge that we are living in a mixed world. I'm in the same boat. I have been for over a year. I've been observing Sharepoint as a product in a large organization, but also how it is perceived in online communities. I have used it myself at the power-user level (no real custom development) and also was closely involved in actual development projects. I'd say I now know enough to at least form an opinion about Sharepoint, so here goes some random observations:

• Sharepoint is great for end users and power users. It has a viral thing going on. As an end user you can freely create collaboration sites with quite rich functionality using nothing but your web browser. I witnessed this myself by building a collaboration "portal" site for our regionally spread development teams. Without any coding I pulled together a site with a news section, member info, forum, subscriptions/alerts, portal zones, Wiki, meeting center and slide repository. The site is of course integrated into the farm, so you also get search, a site directory, instant messaging awareness, profile sites (mySites), the whole bunch. The way it is deployed, we can also access it from the outside and even authorize non-company users. Great power for end users. Little costs (in development) for the business. No wonder this stuff is popular.
• I consider the above observation to be the key strength of Sharepoint: self-service collaboration. Getting out of IT prison. However, this can also be seen as a risk. One of the greatest challenges for an organization is to tame the beast that is Sharepoint. Due to its popularity, without any governance you will soon arrive at the situation where there is a jungle of sites where nobody can find anything, not to mention exponential cost increase. Sharepoint governance and lifecycle management is tough though; if you govern too much, you kill the self-service aspect of the product that makes it so attractive in the first place.
• Despite the rich out-of-the-box functionality, when you start to apply these basic building blocks to real world scenarios, you quite often have to conclude that they do not suffice. I've seen this happen with things like Infopath, Workflow and the BDC (Business Data Catalog). Another example is lists, an extremely powerful aspect of Sharepoint. Unfortunately, they do not scale above a few thousand items, making them unusable in may situations. It is small dissapointments like this that make you long for more robust, mature components.
• Considering custom Sharepoint development, there is much to say. Let's start with strategy. You should think of a strategy to handle custom Sharepoint development. Should you even allow it? Allowing custom Sharepoint development makes it hard to upgrade, maintain or even outsource the hosting later on.
• Once you go for custom Sharepoint development, be ready for the consequences. In my humble opinion, it is a royal pain:
  • Staff: You will have a tough time finding a real senior Sharepoint developer in the market. If you do find one, be ready to shelf out some serious cash.
  • Maturity: Sharepoint as a platform for custom application development is immature, I cannot conclude otherwise based on various projects in various regions, as well as online community feedback. The problem is that many things you would expect, such as development standards, tooling for version management, life cycle management and deployment are not existant or complex to operate. This is somewhat compensated by community-created tooling, but there are very few solid standards or solutions. Basic tasks for things like deployment and version management take longer and go wrong more often. If you are lucky enough to have a very experienced team who has a routine in overcoming the above, forget what I said. I suspect that you are struggling like all of us though.
  • Hardware & Software: Do not forget that Sharepoint development requires quite an investment in hardware and software. Your developers will most likely be using a local virtual machine containing the full Sharepoint stack. You need powerful developer machines and you need to bear the licensing costs. An ordinary office PC is not enough.
  • It's not all bad: I do not wish to paint a dark picture of custom Sharepoint development, I just want to share the risks that I observed. Do note that with competent developers and a good development street, you can build some pretty amazing things. After all, it comes down to regular .NET development along with a rich Sharepoint API. In no case you should expect custom Sharepoint development to be quick, easy and cheap though.
• Some Sharepoint critics call the product "File Server 2.0". While this does ring a bell when it comes down to Sharepoint's most popular features (document libraries and lists), in no way does that actually describe Sharepoint's potential. The out-of-the-box features alone far surpass that description. If you add the components and features supplied by the eco system of business partners, the "File Server 2.0" claim is way off. Have a look at the Nintex Workflow product for example, which offers the in-browser visual drawing of complex workflow diagrams. Powerful stuff that far surpasses the basic sharing of documents.
• Microsoft is positioning Sharepoint as a key umbrella product for enterprises large and small. They are moving more and more of their products into Sharepoint. This creates quite a lock-in effect. You will need Windows servers, SQL, Sharepoint, Office 2007 clients on Windows desktops, and that's just the beginning.
• Sharepoint webpages render just fine in modern browsers, yet the actual markup that is generated disgusts me. It is full with tables, inline styles, inline javascript, making it extremely verbose and backwards. Whilst no user will care about this, I'm a web purist who longs for Microsoft to finally understand the web and its standards. Sharepoint Wikis are even worse. Once you put a substantial amount of your documentation in this format, good luck ever getting it out again. In addition, you should be aware that Sharepoint is not a traditional web application server where you only have the browser as a client. Sharepoint closely ties into the thick client Office suite. This also has consequences for your network topology, particularly things like firewall rules and SSO.
• The recommended Sharepoint farm deployment model is to deploy a farm per region. This means you do not get content synchronization/replication. In global corperations, this may mean that for example Asian users accessing a site hosted in a European or US farm experience quite a bit of latency due to the distance and the relatively heavy Sharepoint pages. I'm not aware of any alternative setups that may work, I was told the regional approach is recommended and even used by Microsoft themselves.
• When it comes down to the costs and complexities of running and administering Sharepoint, I hardly have any insight. I do have a gut feeling that these costs are hardly calculated or forecasted, and are therefore grossly underestimated. You may be in for a surprise, especially when you do not arrange governance to tame the beast.

I have more things to share on a lower level, but for now I think this is enough. I do not really want to make product comparisons, I'm just stating my honest observations after seeing the product in practice for about a year now. Concluding, I think Sharepoint is a very powerful and attractive product for both businesses and end users. This popularity comes with big risks and challenges though, ranging from governance, forming a solid development strategy and fighting the product immaturities. I seriously believe that Microsoft has a winning product with Sharepoint, and given they will fix the current limitations in a next version, a product that is hard to ignore for many companies. Combined with the marketing power of Microsoft, it is not hard to imagine Sharepoint dominating the collaboration market, for better or worse.

What is your Sharepoint experience/opinion? Do you agree with my observations? Let me know in the comments...

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