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SharePoint Takes Center Stage at Catalyst Event
6/30/2008
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The Burton Group put the spotlight on Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007 product on Thursday at its Catalyst Conference 2008 event. The analyst and consulting group allocated no less than five panels at the San Diego-based event to discuss SharePoint for the enterprise. The panels focused on the solution's strengths and weaknesses, as well as the importance of partner support in implementing SharePoint.
The SharePoint panels kicked off with a discussion on "The Next Steps" for the product by Guy Creese, vice president and director of research at the Burton Group. Creese outlined both positives and negatives for a platform that's designed to enable organizational collaboration, portal creation, search, content management, support for business processes and business intelligence.
Financially, SharePoint represents a big plus in Microsoft's product stack. The SharePoint 2007 product generated $800 million in revenues in Microsoft's fiscal-year 2007, Creese said. That figure is $50 million more than the total revenue generated by Salesforce.com -- a hosted customer relationship management solution provider -- in its fiscal-year 2008, he added.
Creese offered a caveat for organizations expecting SharePoint to work right out of the box. The solution may require some customization to meet an organization's needs.
"SharePoint has been a huge success in the market," Creese said. "However, what we're starting to find is that a high-tuned SharePoint installation requires custom coding and third-party" support, including perhaps third-party software.
Products that compete with SharePoint include IBM Lotus Notes, which Creese said is doing well but has few new customers. Oracle is consolidating four different products at this time, and Creese said it's a wait-and-see proposition for Oracle's efforts in this space. He flat out said that the Burton Group doesn't see Google Apps as a "SharePoint killer," a phrase used by a Google product manager. Other competitors include some veteran niche players, but they aren't competing with Microsoft on price, he added.
SharePoint: The Good and Bad
SharePoint 2007 contains many improvements on top of the 2003 SharePoint product. Creese highlighted SharePoint 2007's search functionality, which has a good user interface. The portal functionality in SharePoint is less expensive than that functionality in Lotus Notes, but SharePoint doesn't offer out-of-the-box application integration and it doesn't comply with all portal standards (e.g., JSR 68). In addition, the blogs and wikis generated by SharePoint are not up to speed, he said.
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