In recent weeks, I’ve been seeing an uptick in aggression from SharePoint’s would-be competitors, and I suppose that makes sense. Microsoft’s do-it all platform for collaboration, social business, intranets and extranets, content management, enterprise search, business intelligence and whiskey distillation—okay, maybe not the whiskey, but everything else and then some—is pretty much ubiquitous in large enterprises. Would-be challengers have a high hill to climb, but legitimate questions about Microsoft’s roadmap for SharePoint (especially as concerns on-premise customers and workloads like enterprise social) have given them a dose of courage.
Still, whether it’s the likes of Jive for social business or Box for file sharing, the bottom line is that these competitors are still pure-play “best of breed” solutions. To wit, they suffer from the same strengths and weaknesses those solutions have lived with for longer than I’ve been in this business. Simply put, they’re expensive and while they do one thing really well… they really only do one thing well.
Stacking a raft of “best of breed” solutions against a platform that does everything fairly well (albeit not perfectly) isn’t just bad enterprise architecture, it’s expensive to license, adopt, and especially to integrate into everything else. One can’t shake the feeling that once Microsoft releases a clear, easily consumable roadmap that answers its customers’ questions, all this sound and fury will go back to being Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot… signifying nothing”.
Good news, then, if you’re waiting for Microsoft’s roadmap. On Friday, longtime SharePoint architect/expert/prophet Joel Oleson released some key observations about where Microsoft is going. Based on his digging at SPTechCon in Boston, Mr. Oleson was able to clarify some things and let us know what to expect from Redmond (and San Francisco, now). I won’t presume to steal his thunder by listing them here, but what I will do is link back to his original post and strongly suggest that you check it out.
Hey, some of it may seem like common sense, but as we all know, common sense can never be taken for granted in this business!
