This is part three of my four part notes from a local event sponsored by Knowledge Management Associates, “Real World Sharepoint Experiences.” Tim Farrell and Marcel Meth gave a recap of the recent Sharepoint best practices conference. This event sold out quickly and I understand that Microsoft may offer them more frequently because of the popularity. Last year Microsoft sold over 1B$ (US) worth of Sharepoint. Here are the headlines for the event that they attended.

Tim and Marcel said that the walls are collapsing between intranets and extranets and this change is reflected in applications. In addition, virtualization is now supported through many vendors. There is a move for Sharepoint to support non-Windows browsers such a Linux (this would shift one of Sadie’s points in part one). At the conference there was some mention of Sharepoint online – it does exist.

Search with Sharepoint is improving. It is important to remember that Web search and intranet search are different. It takes a while to get it set up with manual adjustments to the thesaurus, rank ordering, etc. You need to create a consistent taxonomy and single version of the truth. Also, ensure the taxonomy can be updated and create content types – (e.g. artists, album, track).

Sharepoint workflow is not ready for prime time as it requires a lot of expertise to get it right. I think this will be a critical feature. My experience has been with Sharepoint that if you have a very skilled developer that they can do almost anything but it becomes expensive in terms of implementation costs.

Companies are finding that the My Sites profile pages are starting to be used creatively. This is not surprising given all the practice many people have with sites like Facebook. They also cautioned to not replace the network drive with Sharepoint as these tools serve different functions. Be sure to do capacity planning and get sufficient hardware.

Do not assume front office administration staff can manage Sharepoint. It requires more IT skills than are usually found there. Devote the same time to training as you do to building Sharepoint. This is consistent with the Pam Conway’s session.