Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Connections 4.0 is Announced and Sharepoint is ...

Still not put together?

I don't usually link to articles, but in this case, I am making an exception.

If Sharepoint is on your radar, you may find this interesting reading. If you already have Sharepoint, you may want to give some feedback on the issues the author, Tony Byrne, has with Sharepoint.

http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/News/News-Analysis/SharePoint-2013-Is-it-a-product-or-a-platform-84513.aspx

Some highlights (my bold):

Use SharePoint as an out-of-box application whenever possible. We designed the new SharePoint UI to be clean, simple and fast and work great out-of-box. We encourage you not to modify it, which could add complexity, performance and upgradeability and to focus your energy on working with users and groups to understand how to use SharePoint to improve productivity and collaboration, and identifying and promoting best practices in your organization.


I believe that if you look more deeply past the UI, you'll discover that your colleagues really want polished applications that solve specific problems. The dearth of specific, elaborated applications in SharePoint has been its biggest Achilles heel (realstorygroup.com/Blog/2263-Three-options-for-social-enabling-SharePoint).Sure, SharePoint offers blogs, wikis, forums and status messages. But those are just services that need to be integrated and extended within some context to add real value.
I haven't (yet) seen that approach change in SharePoint 2013. The new version features a lot of snazzy new services, but you'll need someone else to turn them into applications.

Could it be that Redmond is not in agreement on what their product does? They are not alone in this regard, but given how so many claim Sharepoint can do so much, the reality may not be as everyone believes.

6 comments:

  1. SharePoint is definitely sending out somem confusing messages. If you look at the pages for SharePoint 2007 and 2010 they call it a social platform. But now as 2013 is coming out, they are calling it the first release to be social . Based on what I've read so far, it doesn't seem too exciting.

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  2. Maybe they are getting closer, but they still have far to go because they are document centric at Microsoft, not people focused like Connections.

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  3. I think the real competitor for IBM is not Sharepoit, it will be Yammer: http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2012/06/q-why-does-microsoft-need-yammer-a-to-save-sharepoint.php

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  4. Alberto, I am not so sure if yammer will be it anymore than groove would be it. Although in groove's case it was to buy Ray Ozzie.
    I still find it funny that 20 years later the world finally sees the need for Notes and Domino.

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  5. If we look at the mobile support side, Yammer is better but still other than that SharePoint is good and as it is getting updated there will be more new features to use from that.

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  6. Amery, I think the Connections mobile client is pretty good, in some ways better than the browser based system. I want to go straight to something it's a few clicks away. I have not used the newer Sharepoint mobile clients so can not really compare. In general I think the problem was and is that Sharepoint needs developers to make it do what people want. Which to me is a frustrating idea from a business perspective.

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