The Strange Case of SharePoint

In 1998, I was working on a project for the US Air Force; we were assigned to deploy the first iteration of the AF Portal. This was part of a larger project called GCSS-AF (Global Combat Support System); specifically, our portion was referred to as the Headquarters Information Program or HIP.  I always liked that acronym.

We were viewing the problem through the lens of managing n-tier architecture layers. The presentation layer was divided into what we'd consider "Services" these days and consisted of:

• Collaboration
• Security
• Portal Personalization

As part of our preliminary analysis and architecture effort, we were tasked to evaluate the various COTS (Commercial Off-The Shelf) software that was available to handle these capabilities. This is how I was first introduced to "Site Server." For those of you who might remember, Site Server is what SharePoint used to be referred to during the 1990's (SharePoint first appeared as a product name in 2001). In many ways it was quite similar to what exists in SharePoint today with the primary exception that it had a variety of e-commerce features that were later split out into what has now become Microsoft Commerce Server.

SharePoint began life as Site Server

As we progressed on our project, we zeroed in on collaboration-related capabilities and split off a sub-project called CWE - or Collaborative Work Environment. At the time, there were quite a number of commercial portal platforms to choose from and the DoD hadn't made a 100% commitment to Microsoft as yet (both as a desktop application and as a network management platform). Some folks were concerned about security, others about flexibility if we became too deeply dependent on one vendor and of course we had the immediate concern as to whether we could find a platform that would meet our Collaboration requirements.

I was very optimistic that we'd find the right tool and that adoption would progress rapidly and smoothly. Some older program managers on the project though kept warning me that the user base wasn't ready for the cultural implications of something like SharePoint. I dismissed those warnings as pessimism, at least at first. Why wouldn't users want to take advantage of document management, elimination of shared drives, the introduction of online meetings and more. Tools like Webex were just beginning to become well-known at this time and we had a list of synchronous and asynchronous features we were hoping to deploy. Site Server seemed strong on document management yet fairly weak in most other areas of collaboration so despite some early positive feedback was dropped from our evaluation.

Fast forward 10 years or more. After deploying many types of collaboration and portal tools, the DoD is moving to standardize on guess what, SharePoint.  One might well wonder what happened; even more interesting, SharePoint is enjoying a resurgence in corporate environments as well. Has the solution improved so radically over the years? Why did this happen?

I have used SharePoint off and on all during the last decade and despite there being some gradual improvements, it's not the killer collaboration app we were thinking about back in 1998/1999. The question that's puzzled me is whether my mentor back in 1998 was right; are large organizations culturally unprepared for true virtual collaboration and if so what form will it really need to take to be adopted? Right now it seems as though we're facing two somewhat different paradigms for collaboration - sort of a SharePoint versus Facebook showdown. Maybe we could define the contrast between the two approaches as informal (social media based) vs. formal collaboration. Can these be combined and how long does it take to acclimate complex organizations to really use tools like this?

Does Mark Zuckerberg use SharePoint at Facebook, good question...

These are questions that are immediate and pertinent to most large organizations today. I've sat in meetings on this very topic at three different commercial clients over the past two years and of course as noted previously the federal government is viewing collaboration as a service and looking (at least for now) at the formal, SharePoint paradigm to facilitate those services. So, why do I call this a strange case - 14 years later - with minimal improvements SharePoint won a battle I thought it had soundly lost while dozens of more interesting products bit the dust during the interim. Often times a product itself is a secondary consideration to process and process is very often dependent upon organizational culture. Even though most of us view the emerging technical products and trends we hear about in the media as overnight phenomena, they usually in fact involve years of behind the scenes acclimatization with similar products or technologies (many of which are soon forgotten).  SharePoint has the unique distinction of developing its own unique trend-line that after a decade finally led to its mass adoption...

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