SharePoint and Lotus Notes: Deeper and Wider Challenges
June 24, 2008
Oliver Marks’s “Microsoft Office SharePoint Server: A Next Generation of Deeper, Wider Content Silos?” stopped me in my tracks. You may want to read the complete essay here. Mr. Marks has done a nice piece of work. The seed from which this analysis germinated was a discussion at the Enterprise 2.0 conference during which Microsoft and IBM each demonstrated their respective products, SharePoint and Lotus Notes.
I have some lame duck experience with both systems, and I have to admit, I am not exactly sure what product category is appropriate for either product. Mr. Marks’s nailed the issue squarely in two of his observations.
First, with regard to IBM and Lotus Notes, he writes:
…It’s not too hard to see where that supertanker is sailing: over time enterprises whose backbone is Lotus Notes will eventually upgrade to Lotus Connections to take advantage of adequate collaboration capabilities.
Second, he observes:
The road ahead for SharePoint users is less clear. The partners and front end providers for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), which is built on top of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) continue to build, with some excellent contextual products signing on…Partners are seeing an opportunity to create a view into otherwise impenetrable SharePoint silos.
I agree with his assessment that Microsoft has a number of “disparate products” and uniting them will be interesting to watch.
As I thought about his metaphors “deeper, wider content silos”, several thoughts swirled through my mind.
First, SharePoint and Lotus Notes are what I think of as software that can be dressed in a costume to assume a large number of guises. In the US government, Lotus Notes means email. True,there are “spaces” for shared documents, calendars, and collaboration tools. But email is the fuel that powers many of the agencies with which I am familiar. Lotus Notes is defined by its users. SharePoint can be a document manager, or as one consultant told me “a next-generation operating system for the enterprise”. I think the fuzzy boundaries are a clear indication that both IBM and Microsoft want a class of software that can be sold anywhere, anytime, to do anything. Fuzzy makes it difficult for competitors to pin down exactly what feature set is appropriate for a particular organization. It is like playing cards against a person who can change cards at will.
Second, both SharePoint and Notes create repositories and data stores that can be difficult to normalize, index, deduplicate, and index so users can find a specific document. I recall a situation in one company where a needed attachment was shared in a workspace. In this particular organization, the originator of the document worked in the unit that was anchored in Notes. Several colleagues were from a group relying on Microsoft Exchange. In the span of seven days between virtual meetings in a shared space, the attachment was copied, modified, emailed, and transferred across and within each of the environments. A query for the document produced an unusable list of “hits”. The only way to find the particular version needed by the group was to inspect each instance manually. Mr. Marks’ “deeper and wider” allusion evoked in my mind a flood of murky brown water in Cedar Rapids. What a problem for residents and what a mess the flood creates.
Finally, the problem of managing information within and across boundaries of polymorphic software systems like SharePoint and Lotus Notes is growing. Most users of these systems do the best they can to create documents and share them. The flood of digital information combined with users’ willingness to distribute copies forwarded hither and yon, make changes to attachments, and create local stores with unique file names is the reality in most organizations. The management tools provided with SharePoint and Lotus Notes have not kept pace with the data management challenge.
What’s my take? I think that both of these systems create time bombs for system administrators; specifically:
- The cost of figuring out what is in these systems and then deducing like Sherlock Holmes what is what is hidden but sucking scarce resources
- The administrative tasks necessary to index and make findable information in these systems is getting larger and more time consuming by the day. One question that concerns me is, “How do I know I have located each relevant document for this particular matter?” I just do not know what I have missed.
- The legal vulnerability of organizations with these systems is ratcheting upwards. Email is a challenge. Who has seen what? Where is a particular document? What is the lineage or family tree of a document with an important change?
Agree that SharePoint and Lotus Notes are great as they are? Let me know. Do you believe that these polymorphic systems have some rough edges? Share your viewpoints in the comments section to this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, June 24, 2008
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