CIO SharePoint Questions – Part 3

This post is a continuation to the series I started HERE.

Question: What “Web 2.0″ capabilities do you see becoming more prevalent inside the enterprise?

The enterprise is really getting behind Blogs, Wiki’s, and social networking. The challenge is that enterprise generally doesn’t have a great understanding of these tools or how they should be implemented in the business. Remember, tools don’t solve problems – they only help implement a thought out business plan. Figure out what business problem you are trying to solve – what success would look like – then apply SharePoint IF it make sense.

Question: The more you build in SharePoint, the greater the maintenance, but is there a general rule of thumb as to how much support is required?

This is tough one – mainly because there are several different areas that require support. Users need help with access and basic questions. Developers need code deployed, and System Admins don’t want things to change (because change breaks things).

I usually advocate for a grass-roots end user training program (I have a presentation on this called “Building a SharePoint Tribe”). It will take a few “paid” champions – but the rest need to have a day job but be very competent with SharePoint. The Development community will get run over by request from the end users and power users. Make sure that effective governance is in plan to know what is “allowed” to run in SharePoint before the developer’s mutiny over too much work. With appropriate governance – then if a business unit want to push those boundaries then they will need the business justification to spend more (following good business rules – who knew). Don’t let the techie tail wag the corporate dog.

Question: Can SP in a SAAS environment integrate with an in-house Outlook…?

You get about 90% integration. Where it falls apart is having full “active directory” integration in place so that one user account drives access to everything. When SharePoint is in a shared environment then the AD integration will be a challenge.

If the hosted SharePoint is in a dedicated footprint (like at Rackspace) then this would not be an issue.

Question: Social/Community-like uses of Sharepoint… rating people, projects, documents, etc…

This is not available without some duct-tape in SharePoint 2007 – but is easily accomplished with SharePoint 2010. It is actually baked into the fabric of SharePoint 2010 that ratings of documents and assets can even be configured to influence how those assets are resolved in Search results.

Question: global implementation – is it possible to spread the server load around the globe for local performance

This is not easily accomplished with “out of the box” SharePoint but is possible with some 3^rd party tools. AvePoint (www.avepoint.com) has a very good solution here. It is possible to get “read only” farms in place without additional software – but who wants a “read only” SharePoint farm?

Question: Advantages of Enterprise CAL SharePoint options?

Enterprise features include:

• Business intelligent capabilities (KPI’s, data connection libraries…)
• Excel Services (display an excel doc as a web page – read only)
• Content Query Web Part
• InfoPath Forms Server

These are features with Enterprise MOSS – for a detailed description of Enterprise features in SharePoint 2010, review this blog post: http://ow.ly/1q3pq.

Question: Seems like lots of people are using MOSS for .com – thoughts?

MOSS is a very solid solution for .com sites. We manage several high profile sites running on MOSS and it is a solid experience. That being said – there are some challenges that sometimes requires some 3^rd party software. There is a very good list of public facing MOSS sites here: http://www.wssdemo.com/SitePages/New%20Sharepoint%20Websites.aspx?. (Many thanks to Ian Morrish for your work on that list)

Question: Any recommendations for workflow tools for SharePoint?

There are 3 key players here:

1. Develop your own based on the Windows Workflow Foundation which is part of SharePoint.
2. K2 (www.k2.com)
3. Nintex (www.nintex.com)

Part 1
Part 2