SharePoint Internet Business Director, Tricia Bush, shares Microsoft's Vision for WCM.

As Director of the Microsoft SharePoint Internet business, Tricia Bush oversees the SharePoint For Internet Sites and FAST Search for Internet Sites product management.   This group is responsible for the foundation driving Microsoft’s digital marketing strategy. Bush joined Microsoft in March, 2005, and has over fifteen years of experience in technology. 

It has been a while since Microsoft announced at the SharePoint Conference, in October 2009, plans to deliver a SharePoint internet solution tailored for small- and mid-sized businesses, and with the imminent SharePoint launch, I thought I would sit down with Tricia and talk about the Microsoft vision for both Web Content Management and Digital Marketing as well as get the details behind the October 2009 announcement.

Jean-Paul Gomes: Hello Tricia and welcome back from the AIIM Expo in Philadelphia.

Tricia Bush: Hello Jean-Paul, thanks for the wishes; it is good to be back home, albeit the SharePoint 2010 Summit we held at the AIIM Expo was a fantastic experience and a tremendous success.  The highlight of the AIIM Expo was definitely SharePoint 2010, the momentum was palpable, and the ecosystem fire was burning strong. 

Jean-Paul Gomes: Congratulations on the success, Tricia. Now, it’s been a few months since Microsoft announced plans to deliver a SharePoint internet solution tailored for small- and mid-sized businesses, and with the imminent launch, I thought we would share more details with our readers. But, before we get there, I would love it if you could broaden this question and start with Microsoft’s vision for Web Content Management.

Tricia Bush :  Well, global, multi-brand customers are telling us that they are seeking opportunities for greater effectiveness of their web strategy marketing spend. Consider that for many of these companies, each brand operates like its own company with its own web site, its own technology and IT dept. to support the site, and unique groups of brand managers that outsource content management, authoring, and microsite creation to design firms.

SharePoint 2010 is an attractive option for such companies. Most use SharePoint today inside the firewall for collaboration, intranets, and enterprise content management. In the last eighteen months, we have seen the number of sites running on SharePoint outside the firewall increase by 450%.

Jean-Paul Gomes: With the economic slowdown, many companies have tried to get their websites to work harder for them. Could you expand on the extent to which SharePoint For Internet Sites supports marketing activities?

Tricia Bush : We find that Chief Marketing Officers and Marketing Business Unit IT are revaluating and deploying SharePoint For Internet Sites 2010 for several reasons:

First, SharePoint provides an integrated platform beyond WCM

SharePoint 2010 is more than just WCM. The platform provides best-of-breed enterprise search, social networking, scalable enterprise content management, line of business integration, and business intelligence easy enough for the everyday user.

Microsoft estimates that 30% of its SharePoint for Internet Sites customers are using the product for secure extranets to collaborate with partners and constituents. The biggest demand for SharePoint 2010 for extranet use isn’t coming from collaboration needs, however, but rather application integration and the sharing of business intelligence. Customers intend to use SharePoint 2010’s InfoPath Services, Business Connectivity Services, and PerformancePoint services to share critical business information with their partners and constituents. A manufacturing firm, for example, can share its SAP inventory levels on an extranet with alerts to suppliers when inventory gets low. School districts and governments can create key performance dashboards with indicators, creating greater transparency with their constituents. Our customers are telling us that such transparency attracts new partners, new business, and new revenues.

The IT department responsible for maintaining your SharePoint intranet can easily use their same skills for maintaining the company’s .com. As one customer said, the same resources can work on the SharePoint ECM project and then be redeployed to stand up SharePoint for the company’s externally-facing site. Consolidating disparate technologies from different vendors across brands onto a single platform (scaling across many farms) can represent millions of dollars in cost savings.

Developers can take advantage of SharePoint 2010’s Visual Studio integration, using its familiarity to more easily customize SharePoint. Sandboxed solutions allow developers to test their code in a controlled environment.

Second, with SharePoint, everyone can participate

We believe that SharePoint’s ease of use for content authors and it’s highly effective, yet low impact approach to compliance and records management will fuel the growth of SharePoint for WCM purposes. We’re seeing this inside the firewall with all up ECM and we believe the same will hold true for WCM. The more people that can participate in the WCM process at a lower price point per person will aid in SharePoint’s adoption.

With the addition of the Ribbon UI, lightweight theming, site templates, AJAX support, and Silverlight web parts in SharePoint 2010, companies can shift greater control of web content to brand managers, allowing their agency dollars to be used for higher-end deliverables such as design work. And for those companies with dynamic content, updates can quickly be made and automated workflows kicked off for approval if required, allowing content to be quickly refreshed on the page.

Because all content in SharePoint 2010 – wikis, blogs, videos, PDFs, TIFs, etc. – can be automatically tagged with the appropriate retention and compliance policies at creation, content owners and even the design agencies will not have to waste time trolling sites taking down old articles and logos or having to manually dig through archives for the inappropriate blog that is now needed for an eDiscovery case.

And last but not least, SharePoint 2010 is cost effective, and to support that point, I’ll give specifics about the new SKU that we announced at the October 2009 SharePoint Conference.

With the release of SharePoint 2010, Microsoft is introducing a new SKU, SharePoint For Internet Sites, Standard (FIS-S), a WCM product intended for use by mid-market organizations. FIS-S includes all the functionality of the SharePoint Standard CAL, including communities, sites, out-of-box workflows, enterprise content management, and web content management. FIS-S is limited to a single domain use and retails for US $15,000.

FAST Search for SharePoint rights for outside-the-firewall use are available in SharePoint For Internet Sites, Enterprise (customers current on Software Assurance who have SharePoint For Internet Sites 2007 will now be licensed for SharePoint For Internet Sites, Enterprise, and will have rights to FAST Search for SharePoint for use outside the firewall). This is a tremendous value to new and existing SharePoint For Internet Sites customers as they can now use FAST’s search navigators, exact count results, and federated search on their extranets and .com sites.

SharePoint customers of all sizes are looking to the cloud for commoditized digital marketing capabilities including eCommerce product catalogs and shopping carts as well as basic WCM capabilities such as publishing. Microsoft’s hosting partners are scaling their efforts to meet this demand.

Jean-Paul Gomes: Research suggests that dynamic personalization is a growing trend.  What Microsoft’s perspective on this topic?

Tricia Bush: We believe that the future holds greater promise for search-driven personalization and dynamic page rendering, as will be seen in our FAST Search for Internet Sites product. Business or brand managers, for example, can create simple triggers to decide which Interaction Management Services flows to use - query classification, keywords, date/time, name value pairs, etc. – to dynamically create topics pages and populate different web parts. Content authors will create smaller “chunks” of content and depending on triggers, A/B testing results, and the user’s search criteria, a customized page will be rendered for the user, pulling in and compiling the different chunks of information.

Jean-Paul Gomes: How do you see the digital market evolving in the near term?

Tricia Bush: We expect to see greater convergence and consolidation in the digital market. More specifically, we see three trends that will accelerate the adoption of SharePoint for Internet Sites and FAST:

First, System Integrators and web design agencies are moving into each other’s spaces

Technology system integrators are looking for new opportunities to grow revenues. As SharePoint becomes highly penetrated inside the firewall, many SIs are planning to leverage this expertise for building SharePoint sites outside the firewall. To add the design expertise required, SIs are creating web design competencies in house. Some are doing this via hiring, others via acquisition. Aspect bought Quilogy, Accenture created Accenture Interactive, Infosys is building a large design practice, and Sapient is investing in both sides of the house. All of these SIs have large SharePoint practices.

Web agencies will need to beef up their IT resources, form alliances with SIs, or risk being bought out.

Microsoft believes this is a good trend for customers as this brings more competition to market for WCM services and introduces SharePoint to a whole new set of buyers.

Second, advertising, analytics, and WCM will become more synergistic

Ads, analytics, and WCM have mutually beneficial relationships. Someone who clicks on the ad, brings great data with them – where they clicked on the ad, the target audience where the ad was placed; this data is captured in the WCM system and pushes personalized content to that visitor dynamically. Meanwhile, a product like Microsoft’s Atlas analytics, is tracking the clicks, pages visited, and the cookies further allowing customization of the site.

And finally, the digital marketplace must consolidate

Microsoft’s believes there is value in a single vendor that can provide an integrated offering for a company’s web presence: from advertising, to search, to commerce, analytics, and WCM. Microsoft has all these assets today albeit not fully integrated. When we look at the number of vendors and niche players in the digital marketplace, it looks very similar to the marketplace for portals and intranet about seven years ago when we were building SharePoint. Microsoft will use the same strategy we used for SharePoint inside the firewall and apply it outside the firewall to build a Digital Marketing platform.

Jean-Paul Gomes |  Senior Product Manager | SharePoint Product Management Group