I recently attended a local event sponsored by Knowledge Management Associates, “Real World Sharepoint Experiences.” Having been through a few of these myself in the past, I wanted to see the latest thinking on what it is likely the largest platform for enterprise 2.0 in terms of users. Last year Microsoft sold over 1B$ (US) of Sharepoint. Some may argue whether Sharepoint is really enterprise 2.0 but that is their goal and they are increasingly moving in this direction.

This is the first of four posts on the event. The session was led by Sadie Van Buren of KMA, who also writes the blog, A Matter of Degree. Here is a related post from her blog, Eleven ways to make your SharePoint implementation more user-friendly. The session, Dispatches from the Front Lines, drew on 19 Sharepoint implementations that Sadie has been involved with and on feedback from these clients. They are mainly small to mid size businesses.

First – what Sharepoint is: A Swiss Army knife – best of breed solutions are available but they have a more limited range. In addition, it is a development platform – not an out of the box application. It is also securable, provides personalization, is email-enabled, and integrated with MS Office

Second - Sharepoint is not (except with work arounds) relational, transactional, anonymous (everything tagged), or Blackberry friendly. It is also not a cross-browser platform – not Firefox and Safari friendly. There is no rating ability and no granular backed up at this point.

Sadie found the frequent starting points for clients were team collaboration and intranet management. Some clients use blogs, wikis and social bookmarking because they are baked in but these tools are not a starting point. Sharepoint is seen as more effective than other tools for team collaboration but less for wikis and blogs

The main challenges for Sharepoint success are cultural: the clean up of existing files is too steep; there is not a culture of sharing (people see their work outputs as their own and not the company’s); management wants change but will not hire for it; they underestimate the need for change management, there is no governance established, unplanned demands are placed on IT, the organization strategy is not aligned with the intranet. I have seen all of the above myself. There are some technology challenges with multiple versions of hardware and software but cultural challenges are biggest.

Some success factors include: the need to obtain executive buy-in and sponsorship, the need to develop useful applications, the need to not call systems by the tool name, as well as the need to create community and provide training and support. All of these are often underestimated or overlooked.

Microsoft announced at the Enterprise 2.0 conference its integration capabilities with a number of best of breed applications by third parties such as Connectbeam and Worklight. Sadie said that in her experience clients are not asking for this best in breed integration. They do not seem ready for it. But remember these are mostly small to midsize businesses. I think the large enterprises will be the more likely drivers of this integration.