Earlier this week I read an interesting article on InfoWorld, ‘Microsoft SharePoint takes business by storm‘. The article discusses how MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) penetrated the corporate market, reaching 17,000 customers worldwide, using a clever marketing program that entitled the solution to Windows Server customers, thus reaching 100 million licenses.
SharePoint was first introduced in 2001 to less than lukewarm reviews as SharePoint Portal Server. In 2003, a stripped-down version was offered for free as part of Windows Server 2003 R2, which made it easy for users to test-drive the software, and soon, end-user created team worksites began popping up all over corporate networks.
Indeed, excellent marketing and packaging strategy – start by giving something for free, charge the users later. When they are already deep in it, and can’t say no. At first read it can be considered a very pro-Microsoft article, when in fact it’s not that pink.
There are some black spots.
SharePoint, however, isn’t without issues that users should consider, including the fact that it does not scale well given the way it stores data in SQL Server, a concern Microsoft is working to answer in the next version likely to ship in 2009.
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SharePoint does many things, but scaling is not one of them. SharePoint stores everything in SQL Server in what amounts to one universal table, which leads to lots of on-the-wire traffic and a Microsoft recommendation of only 2,000 items per list. By contrast, IBM WebSphere permits hundreds of millions of items per list.
Regardless of what platform you’re using for corporate portal, this is an article worth reading. The comments are also worth your time. Gia Lyons wrote about this article as well.
Or that its social-networking tools are considered rudimentary, that SharePoint’s portal capabilities still don’t measure up to enterprise-class platforms, and that the server takes customizations to make it truly sing.
“I think there is going to be some buyer’s remorse,” Gotta says.
About half the customers I met since starting this job some 8 months ago asked me about MOSS. I don’t tend to discuss the competition with people I meet, yet alone their disadvantages or marketing strategies, but this article opened the door for me. Between all the good things written, there are some things worth paying attention to – like scaling, supported DBs and social-networking capabilities.
The social-networking tools are uninspiring, and Microsoft is partnering with NewsGator (feed reader) and Atlassian (wiki) to cover bases, which will lead to inevitable feature clashes as SharePoint evolves.
In my opinion, the main message from this is ‘nothing’s free’. There’s always a price – either in licenses or in configuration. And I didn’t mention the SQL Servers (and only SQL) your company will need to buy to support the growing amount of data you store.
InfoWorld: Microsoft SharePoint Takes Business by Storm
