One of the biggest sources of buzz in 2007 was SharePoint MOSS. Larger companies and non-profits have been jumping on the SharePoint bandwagon to gain productivity through its integrated set of solutions. A tool that promises to run your intranet, public website, and extranet, and provide content management and collaboration all in one application certainly has an appeal. Conferences like the one taking place in March in Baltimore and special pre-conference seminars on SharePoint have started to crop up everywhere. SharePoint is seems is destined to take over the market.
Or is it?
Integrated solutions may work best where there is stability in the mix of required applications. In the office suite arena, for example, the core elements of word processing, spreadsheet, email, presentation and database applications has been the same for more than a decade. Advancement is characterized by increasing the capabilities within these core applications, not adding new ones.
Applying this concept to the network and Internet space is much more difficult. Given the pace of innovation and change, it is impossible to know what applications might be required elements even six months from now, let alone two years. The hottest website topics these days are social networking and online collaboration tools like wikis, capabilities that SharePoint does not have. Of course SharePoint is designed to be able to integrate with these new applications, but that begins to erode the concept of an integrated solution.
There is also the question of the degree to which each of the included applications represents a leading application in its area. As one SharePoint provider expressed it, "it's a matter of the value of a single, integrated solution versus a custom solution that assembles and links best-of-breed applications in each area." Indeed, that is a question. MS Office dominates the office application market despite the fact that at the time of introduction it was clearly not the leading application in any of the four functional areas. Market dominance combined with a new approach to multi-application integration is what has made the MS Office the standard. Given the rapid pace of change in the SharePoint market space, it is hard to see how that same scenario is likely to play out.
2008 is likely to be an important year in the SharePoint life cycle. It may be remembered as the year SharePoint began to own the market, or it could be remembered as one that saw SharePoint heading the other direction.
