How To Plug SharePoint's Social Holes
Microsoft SharePoint offers a solid foundation, but many enterprises need to customize it or add third-party tools such as NewsGator Social Sites to get the desired social collaboration capabilities.
Microsoft and SharePoint were only occasionally in the forefront of the conversations this week at Enterprise 2.0, a UBM TechWeb event, but ever-present in the background.
In a panel discussion on SharePoint as a social platform, the consensus was that SharePoint contains many of the ingredients of a social application, but by itself doesn't get you all the way there--not without extensive customization or the addition of a third-party product such as NewsGator Social Sites.
Shawn Shell, head of the technology consulting firm Consejo, led the discussion with Sadie Van Buren, a senior software engineer at BlueMetal Architects and Unni Loland, a senior consultant at Bekk Consulting of Norway. All three said they had built successful social sites on SharePoint, but certainly not effortlessly.
Loland said SharePoint offers some good features but that you should plan to customize if you want to use them effectively. "I work a lot in customizing intranets, where Facebook and Twitter have shaped the expectation for how social should work," she said. While it's possible to satisfy those demands, it takes a lot of work, she said.
"It's difficult to create the next good thing because you're limited by what SharePoint offers," Loland said. The list of things customers are often dissatisfied with includes the activity stream, the blog, the wiki, and the discussion forums in SharePoint.
Van Buren added the SharePoint calendar to the list, saying customers often ask her to make it work more like Google Calendar.
Van Buren said that by providing richer profiles and allowing users to create personal MySite pages, SharePoint is giving employees "a voice within the enterprise." SharePoint has become more social by letting you search for "people as well as content."
"What SharePoint does out of the box is so much more now," Van Buren said, but she still has plenty of work to do for the growing number of clients who want to make it work like Facebook.
Loland and Van Buren agreed that SharePoint wouldn't necessarily be competitive with other social platforms, except that so many organizations already have so much investment in it. "Lots of organizations won't even consider the other competitors--they're not going to open the door to other solutions that may be best of breed," Van Buren said.
A couple of audience members spoke up to say, "it seems like it all comes down to, SharePoint works if you customize the hell out of it," and that a successful social SharePoint deployment "involves custom development, a heck of a lot of time, and a heck of a lot of money."
Microsoft did also have defenders in the audience, who argued SharePoint is a broad platform that doesn't necessarily promise to be tailored for every need. "SharePoint is a platform, not a product," Shell agreed, arguing that organizations ought to be willing to invest in customization to get exactly the social environment they want.
