SharePoint Buzz, the Cloud, Competition and Client Centered Growth

Ever have one of those
mornings where you find the stars seem to align between the conversations you
have been having, the thoughts bubbling around in your head, and the news front
and center that morning? Well I sure had one this morning around SharePoint
2010, the conversations I have been having with clients around it, the
solutions I can envision it hitting, and the maturity of this integrated system
and it's flexibility in deployment.

Each and every morning
after getting up at 5am and bumbling my way through brewing a pot of coffee I
crank up my PC, coffee in hand, and skim the tech news world. I like to keep on
top of what's happening because the clients I work with each day have a right
to expect that I am up to date on industry direction and trends and have a good
sense as to the value SharePoint can bring to an organization. In many cases
these same organizations are also evaluating alternate platforms and comparing
them to SharePoint and the Office System. With Lotusphere taking place there
has been a number of announcements from IBM coming out about how they are
beginning to bring their offerings to the cloud as well as how they are
enriching their offerings through a number of new add-on modules that customers
can set up and integrate to provide rich robust services. Lots of great news
for IBM customers that got me thinking why SharePoint has been so popular and
why the demand is so high for SharePoint 2010. With thoughts of out of the box
integration, robust platform offering, and more rolling round in my head, as
well as some recent customer conversations, I then stumbled across an eWeek article
that just further drove it all home. The article REVIEW: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Beta Brings Already
Solid Server into Modern Day, by Jim
Rapoza, lays out in a four page piece why SharePoint 2010 is
such a strong offering for today's Enterprise space. Covering strengths
familiarity and user interface innovation, Office integration and offline
capability, as well as rich management feature set, the author really helps to
lay out the case as to why SharePoint is such a compelling offering. This alone
would have been great news illustrating why SharePoint is exploding in
popularity but then along comes Arpan Shah and a post by him that focuses on
Microsoft SharePoint and the cloud.

Arpan, in his article, SharePoint Online in the 2010 wave, Focuses on
the availability of SharePoint 2010 as a hosted, cloud based service. Unlike
others just now entering the fray with cloud based alternatives for their
collaboration stack Microsoft has a successful track record of hosting it's
collaborative stack in the cloud for large enterprises (such as Coca Cola) and is building on that
success and taking it to whole new levels. As I look at how our competitors are
trying to keep pace in this space, see the buzz building in reviews like REVIEW: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Beta Brings Already
Solid Server into Modern Day, observe our growth in the cloud
offering market, and talk to customers each day, there are a number points that
seem to coalesce repeatedly. These include steady, real world, customer driven
growth of product offering as well as robust cloud hosting that provides
for the maximum flexibility for customers.

As the author of REVIEW: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Beta Brings Already
Solid Server into Modern Day mentions SharePoint's origins
really began with modest aspirations around simple document centric
collaboration. With each iteration customers have stretched it's capacity,
provided feedback, and the upcoming SharePoint 2010 reflects a product that is
really a reflection of the collective wants and needs of its user base.
SharePoint 2010 delivers out of the box rich collaboration, records management,
web content management, digital asset management, robust site and portal
creation, web 2.0 social computing, enterprise search, business insight and
intelligence capability, business driven composite application delivery, as
well as a rich development platform that leverages the skills of the largest
installed base of programmers. It does all of this out of the box without
requiring substantial integration services or requiring substantial re-training
of a company's user base. Need robust enterprise forms and process management?
Out of the box. Need deep user friendly business intelligence? Out of the box.
Need records management that can deliver the requirements you have for
compliance? You guessed it, out of the box.

As I present SharePoint
2010 to customers who are facing strapped budgets, the products breadth and
depth of workload offerings is a breath of fresh air for many organizations. IT
can move away from lengthy integration projects and instead focus on delivering
value to their internal clients. Features such as PowerPivot and Access
Services enable developers to focus on the deeper development tasks of an
organization and less time on repetitive departmental development tasks.
Organization such as Coca Cola are finding that the
maturity and robustness of Microsoft's cloud offerings around SharePoint can
help them to save real money while providing the flexibility of hosting
configuration they need. It is great to see the power and value of SharePoint
receiving accolades in the press and even more rewarding to see competitors
lining up as they in turn validate what we have been doing for years as they
attempt to replicate much of what we have been doing all along. In the end the
customers are the ones to benefit not only from the added offerings of this
iteration of SharePoint, from our flexibility in hosting models, as well as
from the increase in competition that spurs our product teams to continue to
listen, and grow the product in ways that meet our client demands and exceed
industry expectations.

In the article REVIEW: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Beta Brings Already
Solid Server into Modern Day the author states "SharePoint
is arguably the most successful Microsoft product of the last 10 years." I
would take it a step further. When you look at the breadth and depth of what
SharePoint 2010 brings to the table I would go on to say that this upcoming
release is the most significant product release since Windows 95. Windows 95
was a watershed release, a landscape changer. Likewise, SharePoint 2010
provides the integrated capabilities to enable businesses as no other product
has before. The typical response after a SharePoint 2010 briefing with a client
is some variation of "WOW!" There is just so much, from a single product, that
meets so much pent up business Intranet/Extranet/Internet needs that clients
want to get started right away.

If you have not taken a
look yet at SharePoint 2010 to see what it has to offer you should. You can
learn more about it as well as download the beta version of the product below.
If you are struggling with operational costs/challenges check out how Microsoft
can host your environment for you. Then be sure check out some of the buzz out
there on the Internet around SharePoint and what it can do.

      SharePoint 2010 Beta Download and Information

      Learn about SharePoint 2010 Hosting from Microsoft

      Read REVIEW: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Beta Brings Already
Solid Server into Modern Day

Well time for me to get
back work. Have another client presentation to prepare for on SharePoint 2010...
What else ;-) 

Michael Gannotti is a Technology Specialist for the
Microsoft Corporation and the author of the blog SocialMedia Talk. You
can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.