My take on the recent article from Computer World

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to point out an article from Computer World. The article touches on many of the SharePoint capabilities but omits SharePoint's internet ones. As you might already know by now, hundreds of global companies---many from the Fortune 500 or Forbes Global 2000---have embraced SharePoint to attract new and larger audiences, develop customer loyalty, and monetize products, services, and content (especially when SharePoint is coupled with FAST Search Technologies). In fact, if you are not using SharePoint today at the workplace, you might have unknowingly already experienced it firsthand on the internet-whether you have treated yourself to something special at Kraft, fulfilled your dream vacation through Hawaiian Airlines, or yet nurtured your passion for automobiles on Ferrari's website. 

The article says "customizing SharePoint to add functionality can pose problems, when it's time to upgrade" . However, is this a SharePoint specificity or is upgrading anything that has been customized intrinsically potentially problematic? Additionally, because SharePoint has been designed to cover the vast majority of the customers' needs, customers may want to have a hard look at their business requirements and ask themselves whether they can justify the opportunity cost of customizing (SharePoint, or any other platform and application for that matter). What’s the ROI? In essence, if your need cannot be addressed out-of-the-box, this suggests that you have a relatively unique problem to solve, and the question therefore becomes whether this is one that can be resolved by implementing a "tool" or whether this is one that is actually organizational in nature.  Experience says that the latter case is the most prevalent.  Finally, if you decide to customize, you may want to be holistic in how you approach the problem and ensure that your users are going to embrace the custom solution.

The article suggests that SharePoint does not support certain regulatory requirements.  The reason is simple: many of them contain contradictory requirements, preventing a single platform from supporting them all simultaneously. Philosophically, we have taken the active decision to focus our efforts on building out our platform and the range of capabilities that appeal to the widest audience and drive end-user participation in responsible information management across a broad range of information. As such, we are actively working with our ISV ecosystem to deliver to our customers the solutions that are required to adhere to the standards that SharePoint may not support out-of-the-box.