Rob Klopowitz and John Rymer recently released a report at Forrester titled SharePoint Adoption: Content and Collaboration is Just the Start. For this report the authors surveyed 510 IT professionals about their experiences with SharePoint. There are some very interesting findings I will highlight below.
The core values of SharePoint are:
- Managing unstructured content like documents, PDFs, images, etc.
- Integrating structured line of business data with content, collaboration and communications.
Some key findings in the survey include:
- SharePoint 2010 is a solid product. This was a major release over SharePoint 2007 and it appears to have been executed nicely.
- If you had deployed SharePoint 2007, you are more likely wanting to deploy SharePoint 2010 to correct some of your deployment mistakes you made the first time around
- SharePoint 2010 filled in many of the critical gaps that were in SharePoint 2007.
I find the following chart very informative because it speaks about what has been deployed with SharePoint and the respondents satisfaction. It is important to note that many of the respondents were still using SharePoint 2007, so satisfaction scores for the features missing in that product will tend to be low (i.e. Social, BI).
While the Forrester research shows that custom applications (the bottom bar) receives mixed reviews, Forrester says that custom coding in SharePoint is the riskiest area to undertake. They say:
- Custom code raised migration risk – some interfaces built in SharePoint 2007 won’t migrate to 2010.
- Custom code slows down application delivery – bad code can bring down an entire SharePoint farm (all sites), so IT has to extensively test custom code before deploying it.
- Custom code may not play well with others – Forrester claims that organizations that deploy a lot of custom code often find conflicts between modules.
Despite these issues, custom applications are necessary and you should not avoid them. Instead, you must plan appropriately and put in the necessary controls up front.
Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet) attended a presentation by Rob Klopwitz about this report. Christian summarized the report nicely in his write up at CMSWire. At the presentation Rob emphasized the importance of proper planning when it comes to SharePoint implementation. His key points were:
- Assess SharePoint from a functional perspective (understanding what it can do)
- Determine functional overlap with existing systems
- Develop a roadmap to deploy the platform based on specific needs, risks, and readiness
- Determine organizational readiness
- Start with less risky areas and expand as the platform is adopted
Here at Perficient, we do a lot of business helping companies plan properly for their portal implementations, specifically in the areas Rob highlighted above. If you need expertise in developing a sold roadmap, let us know.
Thanks for the mention, Mark. However, my Twitter is @buckleyplanet, not blucklyplanet 🙂
I think the overall analysis was spot on. SharePoint 2010 has been warmly received, and is a fairly solid platform. But as with MOSS2007, the opportunity remains the expansion of SharePoint beyond the vanilla features. Microsoft is deepening the bench when it comes to IT Pro and Dev tools to build on top of SharePoint, and will need to continue to do so, as the core features become ubiquitos across any competitive toolset, and companies will require more and more custom solutions and deeper integrations into line of business apps.
Thanks Chris, I updated the post.