Executive Summary

If you've ever wondered why so much attention is being paid to SharePoint, we'd like to suggest that it is because its an excinting new frontier, not just for Microsoft, but also for the world at large.  The operating system war is over, in case you didn't notice, Microsoft won. Nothing, not Linux, nor Mac OS can change that, or ever will. Truly the only technology that is a threat to Microsoft in that regard is the Web.  If computers of the future really only need a browser, then that's a problem for them.

The way in which Microsoft fought the OS war is relevant when we look at SharePoint. Microsoft made hardware manufacturers an offer that they could not refuse. For very little money they could put the latest version of Windows on every computer they make, if they agreed to put it on all of them. Seeding the hardware market in that way allowed Microsoft to make money, and gave computer manufacturers the ability to sell them quickly, in very large numbers, and with a wide range of capabilities. The key to this success is the developer community that built enormous volumes of applications (using Microsoft software tools) to permanently solidify both the hardware manufacturers dependance on Windows and the users reliance on the same Windows platform.

The Enterprise Agreement

Microsoft developed a second equally powerful marketing approach for users. It also made them an offer that they could not refuse. Rather than buying the plethora of Microsoft software in individual packages and bundles and dealing with thousands of different products, user number restrictions, license keys and so on, Microsoft simply rolled all products into one set of bundles that you could buy annually for one price. For the Fortune 1000 and beyond, it makes much more sense if you just buy all of it, and roll out as much as you need, when you need it. What's more you could always have the latest versions of everything and could renew it all year after year by simply writing one massive check.

Over the course of the past few years, SharePoint, in particular the flavor that used to be called MOSS, was included in a larger and larger number of enterprise agreements. The perception of its role was that SharePoint is an application that could facilitate collaboration, particularly around the Microsoft Office Suite, extend file management capabilities well beyond what users typically get out of a file server, be used to build and manage web sites both internally and externally, let users build informal internal social networks, and just about any other buzzword floating around the techie sphere in the last few years somehow also became yet another capability SharePoint had. If you watch a Microsoft delivered overview of SharePoint, you would see in a heartbeat that it quite simply surpasses Lotus Notes. How could you not want these capabilities and features?  This is important to remember.  Microsoft cares a whole lot more about wiping out IBM, Google and Oracle than accidentally backing up over Hyland while they do that.

Given Microsoft's business practices and history, it is important to note that they are remarkably consistant in separating what you have to say and do to sell something, from what you have to say and do to get people to deploy it. The most important thing to them, is never to confuse the two, and they are brilliant at it.

SharePoint Phase I

Phase I is simple: Get it out there. Generate buzz, develop an ISV community, get people talking, get people to make it do enough stuff to keep the buzz going and the printing presses and blogs rolling.

SharePoint Phase II

Phase II is equally simple: Deploy it. Rally the developer community, and get them to develop lots of applications that require SharePoint to run. Yes that's right, SharePoint comes with tools that let you build applications on it, around it, and with it. When MS-DOS (that's Microsoft's first operating system) was first marketed, it came with a text editor, a clock and with some programming languages packaged as development tools. Tools in the right hands can do wonderful things, whatever applications you develop with those tools also require MS-DOS in order to work. Ditto for Windows.

The underlying layer of OS facilitates the functionality of the applications that sit on top of it. Only an extremely brilliant mind could look at an operating system and see the potential for an application like a spreadsheet, or a word processor. Nothing about the operating environment ever even hints at that kind of functionality. I remember people saying "why do I need that?" "What does it do?" (Speaking about the operating system). For the record, that's the same thing many people are saying about SharePoint today.

For the software developer the OS takes care of a lot of stuff that they don't have to build into the application. It is present on every single machine, and its always the same set of core capabilities. Put a character on a screen, make the keyboard work, turn on the disk drive, put data in the right places. Without that support creating a spreadsheet would be a far more daunting task.

SharePoint, Your Business Operating System

So, the PC wars are over. Apple is what it is, and for many is the machine and OS of choice, but far from a threat to Microsoft.  Linux is hovering around its 2% market share, and will probably be there forever. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of good and interesting stuff going on in the "open" arena, but compared to the Microsoft juggernaut, its a drop in the ocean. Microsoft won the OS war and the noise we hear is just postering. So what's next?  Well on one level, Microsoft has to keep pace with the modernity of OS X, I mean only my accountant will still be running Windows 95 in 2020, so the OS will have to continue to be improved. As far as that being a major revenue growth area goes, those days have long passed us by. For the big boys, the growth has shifted away from the ground commanded by the OS, and onto a much bigger landscape, the control and management of information.  More specifically the control and management of information within a browser, and also from the MS Office Suite of applications.  (More on that another time.)

How does this relate to SharePoint? First of all, its important to see what SharePoint really is.  We think it is the growth engine for MS, because it is the business operating system.  Server OS and Client OS are yesterday, information management OS is tomorrow.

Think of SharePoint as both a front-end and a back-end.  On the front-end, the application layer (for lack of a better label), it is a set of "out of the box" features and functions that are automatically activated whenever it is connected with Microsoft Office.  It provides MS Office with a set of document management capabilities important to control the creation and revision portion of the document lifecycle.  Those capabilities extend to anything that is a document created with Word, PowerPoint, Excel or distributed with Outlook.   In addition to that SharePoint is also a "portal maker", web content management solution and some other stuff and a bunch of other nouveau labels . 

On the back-end, the lower level, it is MS SQL server with some powerful enterprise platform capabilities added directly to the SQL engine.  Those additional SQL capabilities are records management, digital rights management, document imaging, document management and workflow.  At the lowest level the back-end can be used as a fileshare, on the highest level as a ecm backend. The combination of SQL and these added in "features" make SharePoint an enterprise platform that can drive any number of applications, particularly if those are thin, or web based applications.  That combination of database and ecm facilities has previously only been available from third party vendors like Hyland, and Documentum etc. who also use SQL as the database engine for their ECM suite, and is now supplied directly by Microsoft.  It is arguable (deservedly so) just how "good" those facilities really are, when compared to a traditional ECM platform.  Microsoft has an answer for that too.  Partners can build on or develop solutions that supplement or augment or dramatically improve the "goodness" of the native SharePoint back-end while still requireing it.  In other words, developers can create applications that draw on the features of the SharePoint environment and that require SharePoint in order to run.  To me that sounds like an operating system.