SharePoint Rocklog

I really got a strong sense of what's occuring in the world of SharePoint from attending the conference.   I've captured my observations into my "Top 10" list of observations.

There are 1B PCs in the world, 500M of which are licensed for Office.   100M and growing are licensed for SharePoint.    Microsoft reported that SharePoint remains their fastest growing server product by far in their history.

2) The phenomena is worldwide.

There was a very large international presence at this show.   I spoke with some Germans, who told me that the German SP conference held a few months ago was even larger (over 7K attendees).

3) SharePoint is past the tipping point.   It’s now about managing and leveraging the SharePoint infrastructure enterprises have in place.  

At last year’s conference, there were a number of sessions on installing servers and software.    This year, there was very little of that type of session.    Instead, the focus was on more on how to best manage the environment as well as programs that SharePoint makes possible – e.g. governance, social computing, business intelligence.

4) Love him or hate him, Bill Gates has a remarkable intellect.

He delivered the keynote address and took questions afterwards.   He moved effortlessly from world hunger to broad technology trends to very specific technology questions on Microsoft products (e.g. “What’s your plan to improve seek times in SQL 2008?”).   The breadth and depth of knowledge he effortlessly displayed was striking.

5) The Big Announcement of the show – SharePoint Online and Exchange Online will be GA for all size enterprises by the end of the year.  

SaaS (software as a service) is a key strategic initiative for MS.    They’ve already been hosting these products for enterprises with over 5K seats – the announcement was that they were extending this to SMB (anyone can participate in the Beta – www.mosbeta.com).      

Microsoft Online is significant at a long-term strategic level (represents a potential sourcing option) as well as a short-term tactical one (maybe you let MS do your SharePoint Extranet instead of developing one yourself).

6) Even in a world of SharePoint Online, there’s a need for someone (like an internal IT) to bring SharePoint to users.

Even if you continue to in-source hosting of SharePoint, Microsoft’s program will provide an interesting reference for how to structure such a service – recall, we’re essentially operating “SharePoint Online” for McKesson today (a multi-tenant, hosted SharePoint environment).     The scope of the MS offering is really just data center hosting – it doesn’t include user training, user adoption, or even a help desk!  

7) Forrester put SharePoint in a historical perspective – addressing ad-hoc, human activities (the way we work) vs. structured systems.

A Forrester analyst gave their take on why SharePoint’s resonating so well in the marketplace:  Historically, IT has focused on structured data – e.g. employee records, customer records, transaction data – so investments in things like PeopleSoft and SAP.   These investments are typically huge and have already been made by most enterprises.    Meanwhile, those systems do NOT address a large part of what people actually do from  day to day– the production of documents, ad-hoc projects and initiatives, meetings, etc.    Along comes SharePoint offering a great ROI.    “You don’t need a massive R if I is very small.”

8) Microsoft hosts an open-source community – CodePlex (www.codeplex.com).

Traditional stereotypes about Microsoft are rapidly changing.  At this site, Microsoft hosts projects produced by Microsoft and the larger Microsoft community.   The software’s freely available for download.   For example, Microsoft has produced a “Community Kit for SharePoint”, which essentially are updates/upgrades to the out-of-the-box SharePoint blog and wiki.   Codeplex provides a mechanism for Microsoft to trial new capabilities that ultimately can become part of the formal product.

9) It’s still early for Social Computing within enterprises. 

There was a nice summary of some of these Web 2.0 Technologies:

• Listen to me – blog
• Listen to us – wikis
• Find people like me – MySite profiles
• Find stuff I need – RSS, search

There was a lot of discussion about how companies “could” leverage these new capabilities, but less about how they actually have.

10) McKesson is ahead in our focus on adoption and internal marketing, but behind in automation of site provisioning.

We’ve done some creative, leading-edge approaches in terms of the results we’ve achieved with SharePoint at McKesson with very limited investment.   However, we’re behind in terms of how we provision sites.    Many other large orgs have invested in automated site provisioning, where our process for giving orgs their initial site is largely manual.    This would be a very reasonable investment for us going forward, to position us to move to the next level of governance and management of SharePoint.

I was on my way home to Atlanta (Go Braves!) from presenting “How SharePoint Can Make You a Rock Star” at the Microsoft SharePoint conference when a really magical thing happened.  Mark Miller from endusersharepoint.com came up and introduced himself as a fan – he’d been to the “show” and thought the message really rocked, so encouraged me to keep bringing the Rock Star message to the peeps. Meanwhile, I was wondering how to keep straight all the cards from folks who wanted a copy of the deck…. As I told you guys, Rafeo really IS a Rock Star, so a day later…. sharepointrockstar.com is up and running. Thanks, Mark, for the inspiration and letting me guest blog on your site – you rock!

Thanks to everyone who was in the crowd in Seattle. We really didn’t know how things would go OR even if anyone would show up. We were a 100 level session (many IT folks wouldn’t be caught dead in a 100-level breakout). Would anyone want to jam about user adoption when all around us were more technical opportunities?

Well, you showed us alright. Turns out there are LOTS of folks who want to rock on user adoption. You guys get that you can’t obtain fame and glory for yourself unless you empower your users to bring the house down in their own venues. In agent speak, we call that “WIIFM” (always focus on “what’s in it for me”). 

We’re going to re-issue the greatest hits of the presentation as individual singles (vlogs you can use and share). We’ll let you know when they’re up. Keep on giving us input on how we can best serve our fellow citizens of Collaboration Nation. The initial concert has ended and was a lot of fun, but the tour is just beginning…

Paul Miller (The Agent)
agent@sharepointrockstar.com

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