Today I facilitated a telecom with a group of Enterprise 2.0 affectionadoes in our organisation. We do these global meetings about once a month - but recently our meetings have always ended up going the same way........Someone mentions Sharepoint, and the rest of the meeting ends up being a discussion about what Sharepoint can and can't do etc....
So this time around I decided to ban the 'S' word - as I really wanted us to concentrate on the concepts of Web 2.0 and and how they might be applied to the Enterprise and not get stuck on what technologies we are going (to be able) to use to achieve it.
I think we did pretty well - we lasted bout 45mins before this rule seemed to go out the window and Sharepoint grabbed some meeting time! I know that this is just because we are at the stage now where we are seriously planning implementation of these technologies. However it just annoys me that Sharepoint - a technology that in my eyes has yet to prove its value, always seems to hog the limelight away from established technology like Drupal and MediaWiki that have gained so much popularity on the WWW.
2 comments:
Hi Jason,
As a passionate E2.0 evangelist within my company (International Bank/Insurance, 120.000 people) I fully understand your position on Sharepoint. The trouble is that MS has really bought itself into big companies already due to its Office products.
Still Sharepoint is being used much more these days in closed groups, but it cannot offer RSS to the outside (!!!). It seems that Sharepoint 2007 will be giving us a real break with blogs/wiki's and RSS. But I have only seen a demo-video so far. If MS has done its work decently I guess the separate internal blogs, wiki's etc. could be moving to SP (now Wordpress and Mediawiki).
What are your current issues with Sharepoint?
Best regards,
Marcel de Ruiter
www.shapingthoughts.com
My main problem with Sharepoint is that as you rightly say Sharepoint is popular because of Microsofts posistion in most companies, and not because it is a great tool.
In my experience it is an OK tool - you can create some basic sites really quickly, including blogging sites. However these sites feel a bit clunky and lack the slick interfaces and userbility of blogging sites like Wordpress and Drupal. This I am sure will change as the blogging components mature. Unfortunately I suspect that in most large companies Sharepoint will replace the current blogging platforms that you may or may not have before this module has matured which in my opinion can only serve to slow down the uptake of blogging by the business (I think the same arguments stands for the wiki component).
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