7 thoughts on “Sharepoint to be the new Windows?”

  1. That is quite an ambitious point 🙂
    I noticed that your observation of Vista has some striking similarities with Sharepoint. As much as i like the neat functionalities of a properly maintained sharepoint site, there is a HUGE learning curve for end users.
    We are experiencing this at the moment: the biggest drawback of sharepoint is that it forces the user to adjust to its structures instead of building on established workflows.
    So from the end user point of view i doubt the feasibility of a sharepoint OS.

  2. Well said Mark. The problem with Sharepoint like so many other portal products is that many are horribly unfriendly with poor usabilitiy. Most focus all their time on adding portlets, gadgets and widgets instead of spending time on a solid, core product (see my article The big deal about portals under the Portals tab <=== over there in the left navigation). Also regarding Sharepoint as the middle tier OS, I don't think its feasbile either (not in its current form). But I wouldn't underestimate MS's intention to throw a lot of money at trying to make it happen. I wouldn't rule it out per se, however Windows Vista is going to *mark my words -- you can quote me on this* drive a lot of users to Apple. Vista is absolutely horrible. (Note to Microsoft: don't bother posting sales pitches in the form of rebuttals unless you plan on changing Vista. Also note that fair comment is a fair defence).

  3. Hi Toby,
    You got a point with that. A well thought out OS based purely on workflow efficiency sounds like a great concept – just like many other portal solutions sound great on paper.
    Unfortunately Sharepoint is such a case. Maybe after two decades of building user literacy around the Sharepoint concept. Or enough money, time and care is invested to really develop a intuitive interface. And that is mostly missing, not functionality.
    And well, i have stayed away from Vista, and you make it even more harder for me to give it a try 🙂

  4. I disagree that Documentum, FileNet, Stellent and other will become irrelevant thanks to Sharepoint. Sure people adopt Sharepoint because it is Microsoft, it is “there already” or including in some big enterprise licensies.
    However, anyone with experience from Enterprise Content Management know that there is quite a difference between say Sharepoint and Documentum. I am SURE that there will be fairly large number of companies that actually need both the features and the whole architecture of such systems to manage their content. Sure the best technology does not always win but there will be enough demand to sustain and grow real ECM-business.
    Possibly open source like Alfresco can challange that but they still have a lot do to before coming on par with say Documentum D6.
    However, for small and medium sized companies there is a place for contenders. Hopefully there will be some standards availble to make integration with bigger ECM-systems easier.

  5. You are right Alex, that Documentum, FileNet and Stellent will NOT become irrelevant. They are powerful systems that blow Sharepoint away as it relates to document management — and ECM. Sharepoint can't compete in terms of functionality. I should be more clear in my point however. What I should have said was that while these tools feature far more robust DM and ECM than Sharepoint and are highly relevant and needed by many, many organizations, these organizations as individual, stand-alone companies are working on borrowed time. In other words, they won't exist much longer. In fact…
    Already, since I wrote this article, Stellent was bought by Oracle and the Stellent brand no longer exists in Oracle marketing. FileNet was purchased by IBM and that brand is mostly dead too. Documentum was purchased by ECM! So you see, all three of those companies were working on borrowed time and don't exist anymore. More of this market consolidation will continue as the big guns at IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have set their sights high and will continue to eat-up competitors.

  6. The early versions of Windows were often thought of as just graphical user interfaces, mostly because they ran on top of MS-DOS and used it for file system services. offshore

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