Microsoft SharePoint, what more is there to say?
I’ve been debating on whether to talk about Magellan or SharePoint next. It was a heck of a decision, but I quickly resolved it when I decided to do both. I pulled out my notes, did a little research, and remembered the disclaimer. This is unreleased software. Things may change before the Magellan Beta, much less the final release.
Shall we set sail…
Now that I’ve gotten the “rant” out of me regarding on how EMC World needs to improve, not to mention all of that coffee, let’s start hitting the positives. I will dive into more details on most of these, but I wanted to share something besides random thoughts in the middle of my notes. So, off we go, in no particular order.
A month ago I invited people to attend the Washington, DC Web Content Mavens meeting for March to hear a Microsoft partner explain how SharePoint could be used for Web Content Management. Well, that day was yesterday then you missed a great presentation.
Before I dive in, I want to thank Rob Garrett of Portal Solutions, LLC for answering my questions and being, or at least appearing, honest regarding the ability of SharePoint to provide Web Content Management. He shared areas that weren’t perfect and agreed with me on some of the limitation issues with SharePoint when dealing with large enterprises. If I had to deploy a public facing website with SharePoint, I’d bring him on board to help out.
Of course, I’d probably never use SharePoint for such a purpose.
To use SharePoint for a website, you need the full featured Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and not the free SharePoint Services. In general you would setup a SharePoint Farm, consisting of one database server/cluster, multiple SharePoint/Web servers, and some sort of load balancer in the front.
A while back I talked about how the current definitions of Enterprise Content Management left a lot to be desired. They don’t accurately describe the reality of what ECM systems need to accomplish in today’s environment. They are also boring and lack a soul.
I have come back to this topic through multiple avenues. One is the concept of Invisible ECM from Billy and crew over at Oracle. It resonated very strongly with my previous discussions on Transparent ECM. We can debate terminology later, but what is important now is the shared concept.
A second avenue comes from my need to explain where ECM is going, ECM 2.0, in a simple and concise way. I can explain it and speak passionately on the topic. The need to get the concept out there in one breath has become more important as I talk to more people.
I have developed a proposed definition for your consideration. I would love feedback. I will approve all constructive comments for sharing, though I may not respond until a subsequent post. I’ll throw it out there and then discuss it briefly. Remember, I want this definition to have a soul.
Enterprise Content Management is the empowerment of all content within an organization. This is accomplished through the centralized management of content, allowing for people and systems to access and manage content from within any business context using platform agnostic standards.
Before continuing, I’ll pause to let the laughter die down. Done yet? Don’t worry, I’ll wait…
Seriously, Microsoft continues to push SharePoint 2007 for Web Content Management. I’m sure it can be done, but it seems a bad fit. SharePoint’s primary weakness, in my opinion, is the inability to scale for the large Enterprise. Now imagine managing a large website. There are two options here:
It appears that I’m not the only person that thinks that SharePoint isn’t a good fit for WCM. Janus Boye over at CMS Watch shared a couple of stories from some Danish companies that wanted to use SharePoint for WCM. They couldn’t find anyone that would do is for them, and one of them even asked Microsoft directly. The closest they got was one that offered to do it on SharePoint 2003!
Thought I would let me next post on security in ECM percolate for another day and share something that Jed found. He found a second blog by Chuck Hollis chronicling EMC’s adoption of Social Media as an Enterprise 2.0 effort. The blog started in August, so I started reading there as Jed recommended. I’m going to chronicle my adventure through his blog.
These are posts that I found particularly insightful or useful. If you don’t have time to read the whole sequence, you can jump around.
Wanted to take a quick break to comment on a post I read on Big Men On Content. This is a blog I have recently added to my regular read list, such as I read any blog “regularly” these days given my recent workload. It mentions into the perils of ECM vendors hitching their wagon to SharePoint with the observation that Microsoft doesn’t need them. They are right and they are wrong. Where they are wrong is slight and the whole concept is worth exploring.
Andrew Chapman got a new gig. He is now in charge of SharePoint solutions for EMC. I am assuming that this includes Content Services for SharePoint (notice the old site link still works) as well as any other current and future products. I couldn’t be happier. Andrew knows how to listen and evolve his thoughts based upon new information and experiences.
In many ways, this is an out-growth of his work in the world of compliance and records. He had seen how organizations were having trouble managing their growing SharePoint environments and they were asking him how to get Documentum and SharePoint to work together. Organizations like SharePoint’s user-interface and Documentum’s ability to enforce business rules and manage the large amounts of information being stored. Andrew voiced his opinion one too many times and his new job was born.
So, a while back, Oracle made a play for BEA at $17 per share. BEA told them to take a hike for anything under $21. Today, BEA caved at $19.375. That’s right, caved. When you offer someone a 25% premium and then later are able to buy them for only a 24% premium, you win. Yeah, they may be spending an extra $1.8 billion, but BEA is worth a lot more now. What does this mean? It depends on who you ask…
Sometimes I miss the 90s. Search was so easy in ECM environments. Everyone used a bundled Verity and was happy.
Then things changed. People started to notice that if you actually used the system on an large scale, search performance degraded. There were many reasons for this. One was that vendors weren’t upgrading their bundled Verity engine. Another was that the engine was sitting on the same machine as the primary ECM server, so resources were being consumed at an increasing rate.
Word of Pie 