*so long as I build out the required functionality myself.
Let me explain.
I attended a customer demonstration session today given by Elliot Gerard of General Mills, the good people who bring you Count Chocula cereal and the Pillsbury Dough Boy (getting hungry just thinking about it). They are long time SharePoint users dating back to the original “Tahoe” version in 2001 and have developed a significant amount of in-house expertise with the tool since that time. In addition, they have a good relationship with Microsoft and regularly share knowledge about SharePoint between their technical team and Microsoft’s experts.
The work that General Mills has done in SharePoint is nothing less than impressive. They have created pretty much everything I think is needed to fill some of the gaps in the application. For example, they’ve built in a unique SharePoint documnent ID structure that allows for persistent linking to documents in SharePoint libraries, created a really slick way of adding metadata when uploading multiple documents at one time and have built a custom records dispostion process that allows users to either delete or renew any documents that have passed their retention periods (the way they’ve handled the application of retention information in the first place is cool too, but too detailed to go into here). I suspect this is exactly the kind of work Microsoft was hoping would happen given the flexible development capacity of the tool. If the reaction from the reps ranging from large technology companies and airlines is any indication, Microsoft is going to face a fair bit of pressure to include many of the features General Mills has created in the next version of SharePoint.
The likelihood that some or all of this functionality will be baked into SharePoint’s vNext seems even higher given the intersting discussion I had with a couple of members of the SharePoint development team at the ‘Ask the Experts’ lunch. I felt a bit sorry for everyone wearing the bright white “Ask Me a Question, I’m an Expert!” t-shirts but I guess that falls into the category of “other duties as assigned” in the standard Microsoft employee agreement. But I digress. The guys I spoke with confirmed that some of the finer points of ECM are a bit new to the more senior people at Microsoft (see my last couple of blog posts for more examples of this) but they said that the level of understanding was growing. Their plan seemed to be to allow partners and customers to build out missing functionality to see what really is required by the end user community and that the best examples of these customizations will be included in future versions of the tool. No one was willing to commit to anything formally of course but I was left with a good indication that at least a few of the functions General Mills has built would be included in the next release (if not exactly the same, the basic concept will be there).
Now, before you go and accuse me of being anti-SharePoint (or pro-SharePoint, or pro- / anti-anything else) let me say that the approach Microsoft has taken is a sound one; allowing the user and developer communities to really drive the requirements for a tool in a real-world setting is a great idea. Some may look at this and say that the tool is half-baked, others would say it’s extremely flexible. Neither perspective is wrong. As I think I say at least every other post, it all depends on what problem you’re trying to solve. If it’s collaboration you’re after and you’ve got a couple of .NET rock stars in your stable, fill your boots with SharePoint. If you need to meet stringent regulatory requirements or get sued a lot, consider Documentum or Livelink. If you’ve got both scenarios at your organization, consider implementing both. Tools to connect SharePoint and other ECM apps are also maturing rapidly and hold the potential to create a ‘best of both worlds’ scenario, so hopefully everyone wins in the end.
Looking forward to seeing my family again tomorrow after what has been a long four days. It was definitely worthwhile to attend this event and Microsoft did their usual good job of keeping us well-fed and entertained. It will be interesting to see how things evolve with the product come this time next year.