Is SharePoint really a less risky choice than better alternatives?

SharePoint 2007, the popular six-pack from Microsoft, has come a long way in the marketplace since its release back in the pre-credit crunch days of October 2006. SharePoint has not evolved much, except for a few fixes in Service Pack 1 and a subtle license change, but the product has seen tremendous adoption around the world, much to the financial benefit of system integrators. In many organisations it is considered less risky to go with SharePoint than with any of the many alternatives available, even though it may actually not be the best fit for your project

So why is SharePoint less risky? For the simple reason that it tends to enjoys the support of the  executive management. I still meet organisations where SharePoint is nominated as the ‘one ring to rule them all’. A single platform to be used for all online projects. If you ask management, they might say something like, we have already invested in SharePoint and according to Microsoft it also has blog and wiki functionality, so why do you need to go out and find yet another vendor? To be fair, SharePoint does have several strengths and many successful case studies. What is interesting is that Microsoft has managed to cleverly position SharePoint so that project managers and corporate webmasters have to go through the strange “reversal task” of convincing management that SharePoint absolutely cannot be used, before they get permission to look at the marketplace for alternatives. This reminds me of the position IBM had when I was still a little kid, when even practitioners believed that “nobody got fired for buying from IBM”.

To briefly summarize the usage across the 6 different areas (see illustration) offered by the product, here’s what I see in our community of practice: Many use it for collaboration and portals. Fewer use it for enterprise search and enterprise content management. Fewer still have adopted it for business processes, forms and business intelligence. Outside our community, 5 out of the 10 best intranets in 2009 were based on SharePoint.

Increasingly organisations have found out where SharePoint presents shortcomings, e.g. for web standards, accessibility, search and public websites. It is now more common for organisations to use SharePoint behind the firewall in organisations and then use something else for the public website. If you find that SharePoint does not meet your requirements, my advice would be that SharePoint would indeed be a very risky pick, regardless of whether you have executive management acting as cheerleaders for Microsoft. You should communicate your concerns internally, as you will be faced with more risk down the line in your project by using the wrong product than you will by raising the issue initially. Using the wrong product will only keep money flowing to the eco-system of Microsoft partners; a breed that have now started feeling the financial crisis. Don’t forget who is paying the bill and who has to go cap in hand to management in case of budget overruns.

As a final note: SharePoint 2007 SP2 is due out very soon. I’m not impressed as I commented back in October.