Each and every morning after getting up at 5am and bumbling my way through brewing a pot of coffee I crank up my PC, coffee in hand, and skim the tech news world. I like to keep on top of what's happening because the clients I work with each day have a right to expect that I am up to date on industry direction and trends and have a good sense as to the value SharePoint can bring to an organization. In many cases these same organizations are also evaluating alternate platforms and comparing them to SharePoint and the Office System. With Lotusphere taking place there has been a number of announcements from IBM coming out about how they are beginning to bring their offerings to the cloud as well as how they are enriching their offerings through a number of new add-on modules that customers can set up and integrate to provide rich robust services. Lots of great news for IBM customers that got me thinking why SharePoint has been so popular and why the demand is so high for SharePoint 2010. With thoughts of out of the box integration, robust platform offering, and more rolling round in my head, as well as some recent customer conversations, I then stumbled across an eWeek article that just further drove it all home. The article REVIEW: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Beta Brings Already Solid Server into Modern Day, by Jim Rapoza, lays out in a four page piece why SharePoint 2010 is such a strong offering for today's Enterprise space. Covering strengths familiarity and user interface innovation, Office integration and offline capability, as well as rich management feature set, the author really helps to lay out the case as to why SharePoint is such a compelling offering. This alone would have been great news illustrating why SharePoint is exploding in popularity but then along comes Arpan Shah and a post by him that focuses on Microsoft SharePoint and the cloud.
Arpan, in his article, SharePoint Online in the 2010 wave, Focuses on the availability of SharePoint 2010 as a hosted, cloud based service. Unlike others just now entering the fray with cloud based alternatives for their collaboration stack Microsoft has a successful track record of hosting it's collaborative stack in the cloud for large enterprises (such as Coca Cola) and is building on that success and taking it to whole new levels. As I look at how our competitors are trying to keep pace in this space, see the buzz building in reviews like REVIEW: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Beta Brings Already Solid Server into Modern Day, observe our growth in the cloud offering market, and talk to customers each day, there are a number points that seem to coalesce repeatedly. These include steady, real world, customer driven growth of product offering as well as robust cloud hosting that provides for the maximum flexibility for customers.
As the author of REVIEW: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Beta Brings Already Solid Server into Modern Day mentions SharePoint's origins really began with modest aspirations around simple document centric collaboration. With each iteration customers have stretched it's capacity, provided feedback, and the upcoming SharePoint 2010 reflects a product that is really a reflection of the collective wants and needs of its user base. SharePoint 2010 delivers out of the box rich collaboration, records management, web content management, digital asset management, robust site and portal creation, web 2.0 social computing, enterprise search, business insight and intelligence capability, business driven composite application delivery, as well as a rich development platform that leverages the skills of the largest installed base of programmers. It does all of this out of the box without requiring substantial integration services or requiring substantial re-training of a company's user base. Need robust enterprise forms and process management? Out of the box. Need deep user friendly business intelligence? Out of the box. Need records management that can deliver the requirements you have for compliance? You guessed it, out of the box.
As I present SharePoint 2010 to customers who are facing strapped budgets, the products breadth and depth of workload offerings is a breath of fresh air for many organizations. IT can move away from lengthy integration projects and instead focus on delivering value to their internal clients. Features such as PowerPivot and Access Services enable developers to focus on the deeper development tasks of an organization and less time on repetitive departmental development tasks. Organization such as Coca Cola are finding that the maturity and robustness of Microsoft's cloud offerings around SharePoint can help them to save real money while providing the flexibility of hosting configuration they need. It is great to see the power and value of SharePoint receiving accolades in the press and even more rewarding to see competitors lining up as they in turn validate what we have been doing for years as they attempt to replicate much of what we have been doing all along. In the end the customers are the ones to benefit not only from the added offerings of this iteration of SharePoint, from our flexibility in hosting models, as well as from the increase in competition that spurs our product teams to continue to listen, and grow the product in ways that meet our client demands and exceed industry expectations.
In the article REVIEW: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Beta Brings Already Solid Server into Modern Day the author states "SharePoint is arguably the most successful Microsoft product of the last 10 years." I would take it a step further. When you look at the breadth and depth of what SharePoint 2010 brings to the table I would go on to say that this upcoming release is the most significant product release since Windows 95. Windows 95 was a watershed release, a landscape changer. Likewise, SharePoint 2010 provides the integrated capabilities to enable businesses as no other product has before. The typical response after a SharePoint 2010 briefing with a client is some variation of "WOW!" There is just so much, from a single product, that meets so much pent up business Intranet/Extranet/Internet needs that clients want to get started right away.
If you have not taken a look yet at SharePoint 2010 to see what it has to offer you should. You can learn more about it as well as download the beta version of the product below. If you are struggling with operational costs/challenges check out how Microsoft can host your environment for you. Then be sure check out some of the buzz out there on the Internet around SharePoint and what it can do.
SharePoint 2010 Beta Download and Information
Learn about SharePoint 2010 Hosting from Microsoft
Read REVIEW: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Beta Brings Already Solid Server into Modern Day
Well time for me to get back work. Have another client presentation to prepare for on SharePoint 2010... What else ;-)
Michael Gannotti is a Technology Specialist for the Microsoft Corporation and the author of the blog SocialMedia Talk. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.
cool programs make it easier though
Try to compare other softwares I had tried.