Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) is a great success and its 2007 version (the third iteration of the product) has even become Microsoft’s Best Selling Server. MOSS was made such a success by a combination of four things:
- A well defined set of business-focused capabilities and features
- Integration into a well known, widely used and liked framework
- The ability to extend its functionality by customization and programming
- Microsoft’s powerful marketing
The first two points make MOSS attractive to enterprises because it gives them the features, manageability, desktop integration and scalability to meet corporate needs. The Microsoft Brand name also helps as well as possible licensing deals that are in place for other Microsoft Products and make MOSS an easy executive decision.
The third makes MOSS attractive to end users that more or less continue to work the way they were used to, but also creates an entire ecosystem in the market for specific add-ons and vertical solutions.
Microsoft with SharePoint actually invented a market segment that was previously covered with combinations of different products filling the Document management, collaboration and portal management roles. MOSS integrates all three components into o single offering bundled with excellent Microsoft Office and Active Directory Integration. Helped by massive Microsoft marketing and an (almost) free basic version, it dominated its own market segment.
And that is how problems start emerging. As MOSS finds its way into more corporate environments and IT departments acknowledge its flexibility and start customizing it, they start coming close to its design boundary. SharePoint was designed to offer MS Office integrated document management with easy to use collaboration features and workflow support. Surely the product can do many more things through customizations but the further away from its core, the more difficult implementations get.
So if the Microsoft Marketing machine keeps pushing MOSS as the one tools to solve all enterprise problems, publicity around SharePoint could start getting less positive as overoptimistic projects based on it fail.
New features in the next version are surely needed but there is also a need to strengthen existing features and functionality and not to add even more breadth to the product, blurring its boundaries even more.
SharePoint is an excellent platform for the things it was designed for, it would be a shame for Microsoft to negate that by trying to make in into the Application Server it never had.
