Make sure you are sitting down before you read this.

I know I have been critical of Sharepoint in the past but the highlight so far for me of FASTForward '09 has been getting to know Christian Finn, director for SharePoint product management at Microsoft. Christian is a really nice guy who has been going out of his way to spend time with the bloggers from the FASTForward blog and myself getting his head around the social computing world we all get so excited about.

Who Sharepoint enables, and why, and how are still big, non-tivial issues facing both Microsoft and a lot of the companies I work for but all I know is these conversations have felt good in a way I didn't expect.

Comments

[Kirsty]

Blimey!

[Euan]

I did warn you .....

[Andy]

hmm you should speak to the company doing the world's largest SP roll out before being so generous Euan (by a factor of 3)

[Euan]

That was the reason I blogged this. I know how much pain Sharepoint can cause. I chose the words for this blog post very,very carefully.

[Dissident]

I keep being informed from various sources (not always Microsoft) that Sharepoint is a social computing environment. Trouble is, out of the many implementations I've seen, I've yet to discover this particular attribute. I'll keep looking since I'm also convinced that the earth is not the only planet in the solar system that supports life - ergo - there must be a Sharepoint social computing implementation out there somewhere!

[Euan]

That was pretty much the conversation I had with Christian. From what I hear the tool has much more potential, albeit sometimes clunkily, to be more social than it is but the people running most implementations don't see that as a priority - to say the least!

[Andy Tedd]

Having used it in a small, but geographically diverse, company environment it makes much more sense there than it does in a big corp one.

Mainly because you are in much more of a make do with what you can get out of a box mode rather than striving for some hypothetical perfection that will remain out of reach.

The ability to collaborate on the things formerly known as documents (if you use Office) is particularly good.

A secure working intranet and sort of social environment for £10 a month is pretty good news for small businesses.

Less good for us who make a living advising on this stuff though :)

[Euan]

"make do with what you can get out of a box " is a pretty good discipline!

[Andy Tedd]

If the thought of you being vaguely positive about Microsoft is enough to make the rest of us sit down, you had better reach for the scotch - I am going to be doing a PhD - LOL

[Euan]

Bloody hell!

Sent from my iPhone

[Andy Tedd]

And I put you and Sambrook on my reading list and they still took me on :)

Tell you about it next time we have a coffee...

[Simon Carswell]

Don't tell me: MS are going to bolt on a 'Twitter-like' facility to Sharepoint now, aren't they? :-)

[Euan]

You never know!

[Nigel]

Very interesting Euan, as you know I used to share your doubts about Sharepoint. I remember you likening it to Milton Keynes! lol.

My org has now gone with Sharepoint07 (charity discount!) and I've just come back from a pretty good, intensive 3 day training course (Silversands in Poole - good chocolate cake too!).

With devolved content authorship and publishing, wikis, blogs, discussion forums and its collaborative capabilities. I'm thinking about bending it to release its social computing capacities.

If you know your way around Milton Keynes it's the place to go and get things done!The only problem is giving directions...

[wirearchy]

As Euan notes above ... Nigel, the points you make in para 3 were the subject of Euan's (and others) discussions with Christian, who admitted to some frustration.

It was surmised that turning on, or unleashing, some or much of Sharepoint's social computing capabilities was in the hands of those who control IT in most organisations of any size. Quel surprise !

[Nigel]

I'm not in the IT Dept ;-> and I control a large part of Sharepoint with our Knowledge Manager.

I found reading Clay Shirky's 'Here comes everybody' inspirational in this case - Microsoft appear to have lowered the threshold to engagement with the social computing applications. Which come out of the box.