Sharepoint Symposium 2010 Reviewers: Need Enough Money and Take an Ibuprofen

KMWorld, a periodical I used to read quite often, but have been turned off by it of late because it has become a rag sheet for Sharepoint and Microsoft, showed up in the mailbox the other day.
IBM advertises in there and sometimes there are even articles about IBM software and solutions on the website and in print. But it really is a MS lovefest (see the series titled: SharePoint: The Reality Series 8 Implementing SharePoint 2010—An ECM manager’s view. To be fair, they do point out downsides, but overall what do you think when they created a Sharepoint Symposium anyway?

So on the cover of the January 2011 issue I was surprised to see a review of the Sharepoint Symposium 2010 that produced some interesting points.

You can read the entire article here, below is 2/3 of it. Bold text added by me.

We created the SharePoint Symposium to praise SharePoint, not to bury it. After all, the total number of seats worldwide likely tops 130 million! It’s easy to view it as a veritable panacea, especially for an organization committed to a .Net environment. It is not, however, without its shortcomings.

Nevertheless, you can use the platform for virtually anything—records management, corporate portal, Web content management, collaboration, business process management, digital asset management ... “as long as you have enough money and ibuprofen,” adds Tony Byrne, Symposium co-chair and president of the Real Story Group.

For all its remarkable characteristics, SharePoint is not a collection of best-of-class capabilities. Search is a perfect case in point. Even though it has improved in 2007 and 2010, it might certainly make better sense to license a mid-range search product, many of which are easier to install and administer and might likely be cheaper than the high-performance FAST search. Arguably, the same can be said about each component of the platform....

One thing that holds true for all SharePoint deployments is the imperative of creating a good governance strategy. The ease with which sites can be created, populated and then abandoned has resulted in a near-viral situation. For many organizations, it’s getting out of control, as witnessed by the overflowing audience at the Symposium’s governance session in Washington, D.C., in November.

From a document management perspective, or a collaboration solution perspective, the last paragraph rings true. The "it's in a database" problem of years ago seems to be updated for modern times and not just in Sharepoint.

Nice to know that not everyone, even Microsoft Business Partners, admit there are issues there.