Know to Compete: KMWorld - Sharepoint as a Collaboration Tool

Michael Sampson is vendor independent and vendor neutral . His mission is to help organizations succeed with collaboration endeavors.

His presentation has parts of his white paper, The 7 Pillars of IT-Enabled Team Productivity: The Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Analysis, available on his website for a fee, although the shopping cart is down currently. http://co.michaelsampson.net/sp7p.html

How Sharepoint fares with Michael Sampson's evaluation:

Shared access to team data: (passes standards for) separate team space, many types of digital objects, ability for many people to access, "segregated."

Location Independence: In order to pass it would need connection in the office, out of the office, and on a mobile device. Sharepoint works in a web browser (works), Microsoft Outlook (problems with syncing), Microsoft Groove 2007, Windows Mobile 6 (doesn't automatically sync outlook calendars and tasks from sharepoint). There are ways around the problems, but they aren't practical for users.

A solution: Colligo Contributer allows offline sharepoint collaboration. It lets users know of sharepoint syncing errors, to avoid conflicts that sharepoint makes it difficult to discover.

Realtime Joint Viewing: synchronous sharing, passing of control, etc - fails on its own but does work if you have other services.

Exchange can not see sharepoint calendars, so you can't do free-busy searches of sharepoint. This makes sharepoint calendars somewhat useless. However, you can create all calendars in outlook and invite sharepoint to use it through email. This is a bit backwards.

Social Engagement Tools: To pass it would need to share "the implicit", instant messaging, presence & availability, and blogging. This would also work if you have OCS, but without it doesn't work.

Enterprise location independence of Task Lists: You can't get a single task list that is separate? Can work to some extent if you have CQWP and MOSS 2007.

Collaboration auto discovery - discovery of capability, "who else can help?", deduced expertise of people, correlated interest between sites. Doesn't work.

Summary: not a mature collaboration platform, would require much additional work, collaboration is only one of the six parts of sharepoint 2007, so you may be satisfied by other things it does.

see sharepoint 7 pillars white paper

strong speaker, made black or white deductions

A final word of advice: make sure you go to training to use sharepoint designer - don't try to use it yourself

Michael Sampson has been working hard on a very detailed blog of KMWorld http://www.michaelsampson.net/

Tags: sharepoint, km, collaboration