SharePoint and Social Software
Wednesday: August 22, 2007 7:29 AM
After my fifth phone call and email on this topic, I think it’s time to create an informative post on a confusing topic. Can Sharepoint and Social Software exist in the same environment or must you choose one or the other. The first step in answering this question is to layout a framework for the components of Enterprise 2.0 and see how Sharepoint matches up. Using Dion Hinchcliff’s model as a guide here are the basic components. The percentages are my assessment of how Sharepoint matches up from a functionality point of view.
Weblog (80%)
Wiki (70%)
Collaboration 2.0 (100%)
Social Tagging (20%)
Predictive Markets (20%)
Professional Profiles (70% wss and 150%* with MOSS)
Document Management (90%)
Clearly, the main benefit of going with Sharepoint for all of these elements is the integration and centralized environment. However, if your company is going to go with the best of breed then you may look toward other solutions. Clearly, Sharepoint rocks on the Collaboration, Document Management, and Professional Profiles. Most conversations I have been having in this sapce are around weblogs, wikis, and social tagging. Let’s start with social tagging which is not built into the application. Since everything in Sharepoint is a list, you can add a field for tags on just about any component. However, the product doesn’t deliver recommendation, spelling, or tag cloud functionality. You have to buy, develop, or download web parts to deliver that type of functionality. The weblog inside of Sharepoint isn’t bad but there isn’t anyway (again, without development) to aggregate content across weblogs, gain access to the most popular weblogs, or customize the look and feel. The master page technique for a weblog is 10x more difficult than doing one for an Intranet or updating the basic theme. The wiki is not quite as good for many of the same reasons but add to that list the lack of templates, rollup, ranking, tagging, etc. Microsoft knows these are gaps since they started on the community kit almost immediately after WSS 3.0 was released.
What does that over simplified review mean? It means nothing; if you want an integrated collaborative environment then Sharepoint is perfect. If you want the best of breed then go with the best solution for each area. Does that mean that Sharepoint will suffer if other tools are deployed in this space? Will the adoption of Collaborative software drop due to the success of Social software? My theory was (emphasis on was) that they are not competing products but rather complimentary ones. They are not Coke vs. Pepsi but rather Coke and Chips. After several great months of growth on our Social Software implementation the resulting impact on the growth rates for Sharepoint adoption …. drum role please….. doubled. That’s right, when the rising tide of Enterprise 2.0 hits the corporation, all Collaborative and Social Software boats rise. From the Social Software perspective, they admit that the massive adoption of Sharepoint has helped them to make inroads much faster than would normally have been possible.
After my fifth phone call and email on this topic, I think it’s time to create an informative post on a confusing topic. Can Sharepoint and Social Software exist in the same environment or must you choose one or the other. The first step in answering this question is to layout a framework for the components of Enterprise 2.0 and see how Sharepoint matches up. Using Dion Hinchcliff’s model as a guide here are the basic components. The percentages are my assessment of how Sharepoint matches up from a functionality point of view.
Weblog (80%)
Wiki (70%)
Collaboration 2.0 (100%)
Social Tagging (20%)
Predictive Markets (20%)
Professional Profiles (70% wss and 150%* with MOSS)
Document Management (90%)
Clearly, the main benefit of going with Sharepoint for all of these elements is the integration and centralized environment. However, if your company is going to go with the best of breed then you may look toward other solutions. Clearly, Sharepoint rocks on the Collaboration, Document Management, and Professional Profiles. Most conversations I have been having in this sapce are around weblogs, wikis, and social tagging. Let’s start with social tagging which is not built into the application. Since everything in Sharepoint is a list, you can add a field for tags on just about any component. However, the product doesn’t deliver recommendation, spelling, or tag cloud functionality. You have to buy, develop, or download web parts to deliver that type of functionality. The weblog inside of Sharepoint isn’t bad but there isn’t anyway (again, without development) to aggregate content across weblogs, gain access to the most popular weblogs, or customize the look and feel. The master page technique for a weblog is 10x more difficult than doing one for an Intranet or updating the basic theme. The wiki is not quite as good for many of the same reasons but add to that list the lack of templates, rollup, ranking, tagging, etc. Microsoft knows these are gaps since they started on the community kit almost immediately after WSS 3.0 was released.
What does that over simplified review mean? It means nothing; if you want an integrated collaborative environment then Sharepoint is perfect. If you want the best of breed then go with the best solution for each area. Does that mean that Sharepoint will suffer if other tools are deployed in this space? Will the adoption of Collaborative software drop due to the success of Social software? My theory was (emphasis on was) that they are not competing products but rather complimentary ones. They are not Coke vs. Pepsi but rather Coke and Chips. After several great months of growth on our Social Software implementation the resulting impact on the growth rates for Sharepoint adoption …. drum role please….. doubled. That’s right, when the rising tide of Enterprise 2.0 hits the corporation, all Collaborative and Social Software boats rise. From the Social Software perspective, they admit that the massive adoption of Sharepoint has helped them to make inroads much faster than would normally have been possible.
Comments (2)
Excellent summation. My company is actively engaged in deciding whether to go the Sharepoint route (low risk, 'corporate-y' out of the box), or Best of Breed route (higher risk, more work to integrate) right now, and I'd be interested to see where the majority of others are headed (have headed).
Sharepoint certainly looks nice and plays well with all the other MS applications we use, but the lack of support for tagging is in my view a key weakness. Simple Tagging of content and files would radically shift our foray into Sharepoint from an 'interesting possibility' exercise to a 'critical business requirement' exercise.
Posted by: Nick McKeown on August 22, 2007 10:25
We had the same problem! Took Sharepoint as we decided to add a new "tag" column in our lists and code a simple search page based on this column.
Thanks for the good reading!
Posted by: alyno on August 27, 2007 05:02