Recently there was a blog post that triggered a blog post, that triggered comments on the blog post. The gist of the comment that shocked me is below referring to SharePoint.
"There's no place to do that today and file-centric systems can never bolt on enough little wikis and widgets to ever get there."
File-centric? File-centric? I really don't understand where this is coming from. I could understand if someone was using SharePoint 2001 how they might think that it was a tool more for just files, but come on have you even tried or looked at SharePoint 2007? I might even be able to understand if you called SharePoint 2007 list-centric. As a framework to build many types of applications, the control is in your hands for whatever you want to create. If you want to create or even extend the blog functionality that is available out of the box, you can. If you want to extend the wiki pages, you can do that with ease. If you want to build your own social computing application, the framework is built and readily available for you as soon as you are ready to build what you want. It seems that many people really want the framework to have all of the capabilities of every application. The tough part is that they want the applications ready for them without having to install add-on's or make any changes. SharePoint has key areas that are part of the framework, but if you are missing something all it takes to add it is knowledge of .NET and Visual Studio.
It seems like the point should be to talk about how SharePoint can enable your business to succeed at initiatives within your organization, not to talk about buzz words or how product A only performs a certain set of functions. Don't get me wrong, I really like a number of other applications and can learn a lot from them, but you need a platform for your Enterprise that can scale and meet many diverse needs. It is just difficult to recommend a product that is either not extensible or does not provide a framework to build upon. By having a framework to build upon, an application allows you to build on the pieces you feel are missing before the next official release of a product that might include those capabilities. How would you feel if your IT department was installing new versions of an Enterprise application every other week. You would always have a system in an uncertain state that could be unstable. I would hate to have to support applications that were too agile and did not have enough time to be tested before they were moved into production. That is why having a foundation for your applications with a deployment process that will let you add functionality without having to install applications from scratch can be useful.
At the end of the day, the social space has actually become so large with so many applications, users, and directions that it is many things to many people. The same is true with SharePoint 2007, as it is large but still allows people to use it the way they want to use it. SharePoint is many things to many people and it does not fit into one application definition. This can make it difficult to explain to executives what it will do for their Enterprise because it could do many things for them. Moving forward, as features become important to the community, you can add exciting and bleeding edge applications to SharePoint or ask Microsoft to make them available as part of this framework to build on and not just as an application that doesn't cross service boundaries. Of course you might not get everything you ask, but it shouldn't stop you from asking. So keep making SharePoint what you want it to be.
