February 20, 2009

• A Teaser... Why Is SharePoint So Popular?

  There's a phenomenon unfolding in the IT industry at the moment with respect to Microsoft's latest version of their SharePoint product.  This product has been getting a lot more "air time" in the corporate IT world in the last 6-12 months than it ever has before, and there is a continuous stream of requests for new installations, tailoring and add-on solutions coming from business divisions in huge numbers of mid-to-enterprise scale organizations.  So what's driving this phenomenon?  Why is this product so suddenly the flavour of the month?  In this article I'm going to talk a little about what's really going on.

  Let's start with a brief description of what SharePoint is. 

  SharePoint is a set of web-portal development and management technologies that drives collaboration between workgroups, enterprises and even between external partners, suppliers and customers.  Collaboration comes in a lot of flavours, many of which are supported by other products (notably Lotus Domino), but SharePoint drives to achieve a better price-point and tighter integration with Microsoft Office - the document productivity suite of choice for more businesses and government organizations than competing offerings from IBM, Sun and the OSS community, while offering a more expansive set of collaboration features than most.  SharePoint's integration with Microsoft Office is very deep - Office enables additional collaboration functionality when working with SharePoint hosted documents that enhance productivity and enable functionality such as review and approval workflows, document version control and merge functionality when multiple users are working on the same document. 

  Not only does SharePoint help users to create and manage document content, it also helps in the publication and discovery of content to a broader audience, whether that be a corporate intranet, a business-partner extranet or a full-access public internet site.  Various types of document libraries can be created, including blogs and (rudimentary) wikis, the content of which can provide pointers to content elsewhere in either its own library or other content within the enterprise.  More importantly, SharePoint includes a full-text search index that facilitates enterprise-wide content search facilities.  This is a big deal for many corporate customers that have been using the "File & Print" server paradigm in the past, or have documents stored in other "groupware" tools such as Lotus Notes.  Unless tightly managed, shared file-servers can descend into chaos over time, and trying to find relevant content (e.g. systems documentation, business process documents, reports, proposals, etc) can be a nightmare.  SharePoint Search offers a way to rapidly tag, index and make these document dumping grounds fully searchable.  Likewise, SharePoint's Enterprise Search functionality can index data on desktops, in Exchange public folders, non-SharePoint web-sites, business databases, line-of-business applications and Lotus Notes databases.

  Records management repositories can be set up using a specific SharePoint site templates to provide tighter review and approval workflows, document access auditing and more restrictive security access if required.  Meeting workspaces can be set up (with Outlook integration) that allow the sharing of meeting agendas, objectives, documents, and attendance tracking between meeting organizers and participants.

  SharePoint is not just a collaboration and document management portal.  It has additional features that make it attractive to medium-to-large enterprises. 

  Firstly, SharePoint offers many interfaces that support getting information in and out of it quickly and easily.  Microsoft's BizTalk enterprise integration product ships with a WCF adapter for SharePoint, so SharePoint can publish content to or subscribe to content coming from and enterprise service bus.  However, other integration products can move content to and from SharePoint using Web Services connections.  From an integration perspective, SharePoint's Business Data Catalog also makes it easier to identify and publish business information across the enterprise.

  Secondly, SharePoint offers integration for Forms Processing using InfoPath or web forms as data entry interfaces.  Once submitted to SharePoint, infopath form data is typically loaded into a document library in which each form is stored as an XML document.  Posting form data can then trigger multi-step form processing workflows, which may initiate system events in response to some form data, as well as human workflows (e.g. approval/fulfilment workflows for order processing systems, or work assignment workflows in job management systems).  These workflows can (if necessary) send messages to other systems and/or to email groups/users for action, and wait for responses from said systems/users before proceeding with the workflow.  Iterative workflows are possible (e.g. document reviews/approvals may require multiple submissions) and the workflow engine is extensible via custom code and/or third party bolt-ons such as K2's BlackPoint and BlackPearl tools.  Note that these tools require very little (if any) code in order to deliver quite complex solutions.  This makes it possible for business analysts to write complex business workflow applications without having to understand programming languages or object oriented design.  The workflow designs are effectively "models" that are run through software factories to create runnable machine code that the SharePoint server can call in response to workflow events.

  As a result of the last point, you might be starting to see what's really driving SharePoint's success.  The processes for defining business rules and site designs for SharePoint technologies are largely web form driven, and while the site template, document library and web part objects within SharePoint are extensible and tailorable using custom code, a canny business analyst (or even line-manager) can rapidly build complex business solutions in SharePoint without having to write a line of code.  This means that businesses can dispense with maintaining large application development teams and deploy compelling end-user solutions quicker and at lower cost.  Furthermore, any extensibility required can be relatively easily developed by third-party specialist software houses, or even bought off the shelf from companies such as K2 who have decided that their future lies in writing commercial-grade add-on software for the SharePoint application platform.

  Keep in mind here that Microsoft have already built at least 80% of the systems plumbing that most enterprises would ever use.  If an enterprise opts to deploy a web application using SharePoint as the publishing, content management and search provider then the amount of code required is far less than that required to build a complex ASP.NET application from scratch.  This frees up developers to focus on solving business problems and delivering compelling user experiences.  SharePoint frees up developers from the need to spend time focusing on data connectivity issues, building "business rules tier" code and instrumenting their applications for monitoring and scale-out - all this comes out of the box with the SharePoint platform.

  So... there's a little bit of background on what SharePoint is and why it's becoming an important business tool.  I've done some training on the product and am now starting to move into a team at work that will be focused on defining and delivering SharePoint solutions.  It's an exciting time - I've been working with Microsoft's relational database product (MS SQL Server) for over a decade now, and it's nice to be able to say I'm adding a new string to my bow.  With my SQL Server server experience, I've picked up some useful insights into data management and business intelligence, and Microsoft's PerformancePoint Server offers opportunities to extend my new skills with SharePoint while exploiting my depth with SQL Server's tools and technologies.  PerformancePoint Server (soon to become PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint) sits on top of SharePoint and SQL Server Analysis Services. 

  For me, it seems it's onwards, upwards and outwards... and for you - I hope you've found this article useful, informative and a good initial starting point to explore what SharePoint can offer.

  • 7:35 pm
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