Search Done Right

After the slips and taboos of SharePoint discussed in my last two blogs, let’s explore the dreams.

In the keynote, one of the speakers demonstrated the following scenario:

1. A business user synchronizes his/her spreadsheet (of sales numbers) with an external database.
2. Offline that business user modifies the spreadsheet.
3. Upon reconnecting to the network, these changes get synchronized with the database which gets automatically modified.
4. These changes are then reflected immediately in charts and stats published on a multitude of web sites.

WOW! Wild! I am sure IT directors are having nightmares since they saw this demo (I can’t get my Windows desktop to synchronize my files with the network properly. I can’t imagine merging Excel cells directly into a database…). But business users are salivating—what amazing business empowerment!

The key to that empowerment (and to most of the flashy demos demonstrated during the conference) is that companies adopt the full Microsoft technology stack at every level: SQL Server, Active Directory, Exchange, Office, Visio, Silverlight, etc. and SharePoint as a content Management/document management/business intelligence engine and as an overall application development platform.

Apart from the reliance on Internet Explorer, a battle that Microsoft is ready to concede, Microsoft wants the whole enterprise application pie and is going aggressively after it. As such it will not try to play well with other systems (like Documentum or Lotus Notes) but intends to create a fully integrated environment where business users are easily empowered as long as all aspects of the work flow are handled by Microsoft products.  Microsoft’s dream is to become the uber-enterprise application centered on SharePoint.

It’s a compelling vision—more capabilities, lower integration costs.  But it’s also a big gamble. SharePoint is by design an application. Going from an application to a development platform is a long shot. I am sure that some companies will buy into that vision. But they can expect spiraling integration costs as soon as they deviate from the standard features and/or the Microsoft stack. There is one solution that I can suggest—buy products like Vivisimo Velocity that will leverage non-Microsoft repositories in combination with SharePoint without heavy integration or migration costs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.