At one of our recent Community of Practice meetings I for the first time met an organisation using SharePoint 2003, who decided to skip SharePoint 2007. Instead they will be migrating to SharePoint 2010 once that gets released, currently expected in the beginning of 2010. This is an interesting decision at a time when experiences with SharePoint 2007 are finally becoming widespread and more established among practitioners and systems integrators alike.
A decision like that calls for careful planning for the future. Practitioners choosing to go with SharePoint 2010 will certainly experience some first-mover disadvantages, just as SharePoint 2007 practitioners did a while back. Many underestimated the complexity of the platform and very few delivered on time and budget.
While success stories on SharePoint implementations do exist, many practitioners have had quite a few unpleasant surprises, especially when using SharePoint for public websites. One such surprise has been around handling languages. For example, when translating from a primary site, you will face challenges if you want more than one version of a language (e.g. a Spanish site for Mexico and another for Spain). As SharePoint guru Shawn Shell concludes:
“This situation leads to one of two options — spend more in translation OR copy and paste content from the ES-ES site to the ES-MX site manually.”
It will be interesting to see which surprises SharePoint 2010 will throw at customers, and how the SharePoint community will handle them.
In order to plan for the future, we always encourage SharePoint users to stay in regular contact with Microsoft and request roadmap information. According to Microsoft they are very willing to share additional roadmap details with their customers, typically under non-disclosure-agreements.
Another recommendation is to keep implementations simple. As Andy Dale comments following a path that many have followed before means you can quickly find solutions to your problems; you (most likely) won’t have problems with service packs; and you will save money. Finally, you will also have a much cleaner upgrade to SharePoint 2010, as Tony Byrne adds.
The best way to minimize risks will undoubtedly be to stay in touch with other practitioners and the SharePoint community at large. Microsoft hosts many events, almost one every day somewhere in the world, allowing you to learn more. Most events are either sales and marketing oriented or highly technical. Fortunately many are free of charge.
Another option is to attend our upcoming events and meet peers where you can learn from the open discussions.
Have you started planning for SharePoint 2010 yet?
Dorothy Hoskins April 23rd, 2009 9:03
What in particular makes it hard to have 2 flavors of Spanish (or French for FR and CA) with Sharepoint? Does it not respect settings such as es-mx and es-es, fr-fr- and fr-ca? Can you not set profiles for these languages where if content is not available in es-mx, it will default to es-es?
I am only asking half with tongue in cheek, as I worked for 3 years on a major corporation’s global website (external) and language switching based on more than 30 country settings was one of their biggest headaches.
IMHO all decent CMS and web apps should handle doing a switch based on language preferences with defaults to secondary language settings if content is not available in every case in all languages. However, often there is spotty coverage in some languages such as Danish while the German may be complete, for example. So in that case, so you show a mix of English and Danish, or Danish and German, or Danish and some other language?
In the US we are often blind to the preferences of other populations for the language settings that they might prefer, such as providing more than one flavor of a language depending on location. If translating everything for Canadian French and European French is not affordable, a company needs to make a business decision on which to support. If their market is mostly Americas, then they can use the French Canadian; if mostly European, use the Euro French.
People who work in regulated industries may have to abide by legal requirements to provide translated content in their markets or not be permitted to sell there. That is the type of incentive that companies dislike, but it makes translation a normal cost of doing business and not just a courtesy that a business engages in half-heartedly and cuts back when times are lean.
J. Boye » Blog Archive » Overlooked SharePoint success factors June 8th, 2009 9:03
[...] Plan for future versions of SharePoint and see if you can be flexible and postpone the implementation of some of your most complex requirements. For the first many months after the release of SharePoint 2010, you need to a avoid first-mover disadvantage. [...]