Microsoft's SharePoint: The New Lotus Notes?

By Michelle Savage

April 1, 2008 — (Page 1 of 3)
New research from CMS Watch, an independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies, suggests that Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is the Lotus Notes of this decade.

“The SharePoint Report 2008,” CMS Watch’s 190-page evaluation of SharePoint, analyzes SharePoint’s suitability for various business scenarios across customer tiers. The report points out that Microsoft shares many of the allures and pitfalls of Lotus Notes, advising customers to establish clear boundaries on SharePoint services to keep it from becoming their new Notes—the platform that everyone loved and then hated.

Jerod Powell, principal consultant at InfinIT, an IT consulting firm, said that SharePoint is increasingly popular because of its unique ability to offer the foundation for collaboration, document management, reporting and business intelligence. “SharePoint’s architecture makes it easy to pull data, report on relevant data and manage mass amounts of data,” he said. “It meets the needs of every organization out there.”

According to CMS Watch, IT shops are increasingly embracing SharePoint as the answer to their business information problems, just as they did Lotus Notes a decade ago.

Powell said, before SharePoint, simple collaboration services, such as file sharing, were virtually nonexistent in content management systems. “Companies relied heavily on e-mail, and file sharing was out of control,” he said. “SharePoint is so attractive because of its file sharing capabilities. Before, there was no reliable method for controlling files other than corporate policy. Now, companies have full control over what corporate documents are out there and for how long.”

“By focusing on basic file sharing,” said CMS Watch contributing analyst Shawn Shell, “SharePoint addresses an immediate need for many small and mid-sized businesses, as well as autonomous enterprise departments.”

CMS Watch observed that SharePoint has numerous flaws, including incomplete integration with Outlook, poor support for individuals working on multiple teams and a belated embrace of Web 2.0.

In addition, CMS Watch said that large enterprises face various challenges with SharePoint, as the controls that enterprises would want to see simply don’t exist natively within the platform. “Whether it’s the lack of a workflow-based provisioning process, or enterprise-level administration, or the ability to effectively categorize large numbers of documents or PowerPoint slides, SharePoint remains ill-suited to enterprise-wide collaboration and knowledge management,” said CMS Watch analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe.

Related Search Term(s): CMS Watch, Lotus Notes, Microsoft, SharePoint

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Microsoft's SharePoint: The New Lotus Notes?

By Michelle Savage

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