chieftech’s blog

I usually dodge questions about specific vendors and their offerings, and instead answer how I'd look at any particular deployment of collaboration software to see if it met my definition of Enterprise 2.0.

I find this pretty easy to do. I check to see if the environment meets three criteria: Is it freeform? How frictionless is contribution? And is it emergent?

It worth considering Andew McAfee's criteria for Enterprise 2.0 software - particularly as we get excited about the potential for Sharepoint 2010 for example. However, we actually need to apply this criteria twice. Once to determine if the software's architecture is able to support an Enterprise 2.0 use case, the second to determine if the organisation will actually deploy it in a way that allows those capabilities to be utilised.

Hat tip to Martin Koser.

Originally, Recovery.gov version 1.0... was powered by Drupal, an open source content management platform offering blogs, forums, newsletters and podcasting among its features. But users were not able to follow the recovery funds from beginning to end as the Obama administration had envisioned — and promised. Nor could site administrators use the site to handle the approval process needed to collect, sort and display spending data being collected from recipients of the funds. As a result, the site became a target and verbal punching bag for watchdogs, open government advocates and lawmakers who were underwhelmed with the content and capability of Recovery.gov.

In response, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board charged with tracking stimulus funds made the decision to change not only the site's look but also its core focus and through the Government Services Administration (GSA) they solicited a contract to redesign the site.

...

Development time that would have otherwise been spent building a custom 60% solution was freed up by the decision to use SharePoint, and that allowed the team to address other key business problems, such as how to get data from hundreds of disparate sources. And while Microsoft has long been viewed with disdain for their near monopoly on corporate business platforms, this time, it saved taxpayers a good sum of money.

We were just talking about Tim O'Reilly's comments on the Whitehouse.gov shift to Drupal yesterday, but in this instance the flow has gone completely the other way.

a new InfoTrends survey found the biggest SharePoint-related expenditures were servers and storage, deployment/assessment services, development/maintenance services, i/o hardware (e.g. scanners, MFPs), and additional software.)

There appear to be two broad use cases for SharePoint - using it "as is" as a simple file share replacement or as a development platform for creating a custom solution. However, there isn't much of a middle ground. This isn't really a problem, unless you walk into it with your eyes shut. I guess we will find out soon if SharePoint 2010 is going to change this situation.

I've commented before that SharePoint can only be used as a social tool if you actually allow it to be used that way, however that introduces some inherent problems. I think this is a nice example of working within those constraints - let users suggest their own FAQs.

The "I would like to" page is at the simple (but effective) end of the spectrum. Another alternative, accepting that SharePoint is broad and narrow, is to plug the gaps by installing a third party extension like Newsgator's social sites. They recently pointed out a case study on PR agency Edelman.

Archimedes famously told us that with a long enough lever and fulcrum to rest it on, he could move the world. The story of designing next generation intranets that are based on social computing principles, what some call, "intranet 2.0", is also locked in a similar paradox: in theory just about any Web-based collaboration or information sharing tool has the potential to be a social computing platform, if only we have enough time and budget for its development.

Microsoft SharePoint is a great case in point. Massively successful, the free version of the SharePoint 2007 family, known as Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS), has slipped into organisations and has found itself embraced by users and IT departments alike. In many organisations, SharePoint may have been the first collaboration solution they had experienced as an improvement to networked file shares and email.

However, Wikis have also grabbed the attention of many organisations. Despite being a decade old technology, it was against the background of the Web 2.0 that Wikis finally appeared on the corporate radar. They offered a revolutionary "every page is editable" alternative to expensive or rigid Web and document management systems. And just like Windows SharePoint Services, there are many 'free' wiki software options available as open source.

You can now read the full version (with a few additional notes) of my recent Image & Data Manager (IDM) magazine article that compares Microsoft SharePoint with Wikis over on the Headshift Australasia blog. This article was published in the May/June 2009 edition of IDM.