PC Week has an article on Sharepoint in the cloud. I’m seeing the desire for cloud services among all vendors although Microsoft seems to be sprinting in that direction rather than the running by IBM and other vendors. I love the quotes about people building applications on sharepoint and that it’s “many things to many people” That tells you a little bit about the evolution of the product as an aggregation platform similar to other horizontal portals.
“SharePoint is not an easy product to deploy. Microsoft portrays it as such,” Oleson claims.
In its early days he says it was a comparatively straightforward tool for document sharing, collaboration and portal creation.
“Now we see full-on applications being built on it; incredible websites have been designed with its publishing features; it supports business intelligence front ends to sales and finance. It has become business critical, even mission-critical. It has come a long way.”
With Microsoft pushing SharePoint into the cloud he says, “it has become many things to many people.
“As a set of cloud services it takes the customer out of needing to manage it; that is one of Microsoft’s great propositions. They provide the services; you can concentrate on your business.
“Microsoft is putting major investment into the marketing side of this already; they are spending billions of dollars on datacentres and infrastructure to make it so.”
