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Sharing the Point about MOSS
For the past few days I've been putting together a presentation about Microsoft's new portal product, Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007, or MOSS. There's a local Sharepoint User's Group starting up, and I got selected to make the first presentation.
Ugh.
This is like having the pope appear at a Southern Baptist Convention, I'm afraid. Although I've been a mostly Microsoft consultant most of my career, I am definitely not a fanboy and do not drink the Microsoft cool-aid. I simply am smart enough to consult in a field where the market is the biggest.
On top of that, I have a lot of experience with MOSS, at least lately. Several of my small clients are asking about it, I had to research a lot of aspects about it for one of my clients, and I even wrote an application to generate BDC XML files from Enterprise Architect UML models.
The problem is that MOSS 2007 is a true Enterprise product. By that I mean that it does everthing but wash your cat. It's got a workflow system, document management, tight integration with all the office products, and a full-fledged template system. It does so much and is so complicated that there's a huge gap between "the way I'd like it to be" and "the way it comes out of the box". So, alas, more money for us consultants.
I always recommend to clients that they think long and hard about whether they want and need to jump into a huge product that is so complex and flexible. I know from long, hard experience that people have a tendency to get angry when it takes them 3 years to make the program-in-the-box do what they thought it would do when they got it home from the store.
Having said that, if your core business is around portal work, such as a training company that needs to present and modify online training material, it makes sense as your key enterprise software investment.
But whether just any organization should get it or not is another story. For now, I'm simply telling folks what the product does and what you can make it do. Along those lines, here are some interesting statistics:
- SharePoint is the fastest-growing product in the history of Microsoft
- Over 75 million licenses of SharePoint have been sold worldwide
- SharePoint is listed, by Forrester, as the number 1 portal product
- SharePoint is positioned as a leader within the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals products
- Over 400 case studies have been published on SharePoint
Needless to say, my presentation will NOT be so cautious. Instead, I feel that the audience needs to know all of the good things about Sharepoint before they start considering the bad things. Plus, if I displayed my natural cautiousness, they wouldn't invite me back again. (grin)
Whatever happens, it looks like there's going to be a lot of Sharepoint work for the next few years!
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