After my recent posts on Jive, Socialtext and Connections, some people have been asking me where I see Sharepoint fitting in. I was planning a long post on it, but having read Thomas Vander Wal’s recent post I have nothing left to add. I’d just like to highlight one of his points:
“Many who deployed SharePoint, thought it was going to be the bridge that delivered Enterprise 2.0 and a solid platform for social tools in the enterprise is summed up statement, “We went from 5 silos in our organization to hundreds in a month after deploying SharePoint”. They continue, “There is great information being shared and flowing into the system, but we don’t know it exists, nor can we easily share it, nor do much of anything with that information.”
The overriding message that we are hearing is that Sharepoint is a good document management / file sharing system, especially in terms of Vista / Office / Outlook integration. There’s no reason why you can’t add social tools on top of it, but don’t look to it as a social software platform in its own right.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Smart enterprises will find a way to integrate the various tools into a complete information management solution. Some organizations will be able to create value from Sharepoint as a Collaborative Tool and as a Social Software solution. Other’s will add tools such as the ones you mention to the mix to improve the business value. Those that choose Sharepoint for Enterprise 2.0 should be demonized but welcomed into the fold. The world is a lonely place, we can use all the friends we can find.
I think, for the most part, your post is correct. A company’s SharePoint architecture requires lots of user input and clever structuring to avoid creating lots of silos. Social software extensions can add-on functionality that resembles what we envision as Enterprise 2.0 best practices. But, by adding metadata, defining content types, and engineering the search solution there is no excuse for not being able to find content or for not being able to share content easily with others. Even in SharePoint content can be aggregated via the search engine and made visible to those that are interested in it. Out of the box, SharePoint is limited, but it can, with careful design improve sharing, reuse and process performance.
I would venture to say that an immediate creation of hundreds of silos is a worst demonstrated practice and could be avoided by understanding user requirements, prototyping solutions, training and change management initiatives!