SharePoint Lags in Innovation, Development Cycle
January 13, 2012
In terms of web content management, SharePoint still lags behind despite its 2010 update. While there were notable improvements in many of the large areas of complaint: metadata management, multi-language, taxonomy, and basic web analytics to name a few, many shortcomings are still evident. Darren Guarnaccia tackles the issue for ZDNet in, “SharePoint 2010: a sheep in wolf’s clothing?”
While much of the piece is spent dissecting the major problem areas, here the author gives some grounding or basis for why SharePoint still falls behind:
Microsoft has gained some ground with this release, but it is still some way off the pace being set by the best-of-breed vendors in this market. If you believe the benefit of having a single integrated suite outweighs its various shortcomings, or if your requirements are relatively simple, then SharePoint may be a good fit. Something else to consider is the typical SharePoint development cycle of three years. While three-year product release cycles are normal for large enterprise content management projects, three years is a long time on the web. Entire new markets and trends can arise in the span of six months to a year.
Two concepts in the above statement are worth some attention. First, there is SharePoint’s position as a single integrated solution. It is worth pointing out that there are now outstanding third party solutions that work seamlessly with SharePoint, allowing the user to achieve the feel of a single solution while compensating for all of the shortcomings of SharePoint. We like the Fabasoft Mindbreeze solution and its SharePoint Connector.
Secondly, we agree that SharePoint’s long development cycle is one of its weak points. Again, referring to Fabasoft Mindbreeze, new products releases and updates are made quarterly for on-site installations and monthly for the cloud.
Continuous quality assurance and performance optimization ensure extremely short release cycles. We release a new Mindbreeze Cloud update every month.
Frequent updates (that are easy to install) ensure that usability and functionality remain high for all users. Perhaps SharePoint will start taking queues from some of its successful competitors and shorten its development cycle.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 13, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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