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SharePoint Takes Center Stage at Catalyst Event
6/30/2008
SharePoint's business intelligence functionality is such that you may not need to use other BI products, such as IBM Cognos or Business Objects, with it, Creese said. In that respect, SharePoint provides an "opportunity for Microsoft-centric organizations to have fewer moving parts," he explained.
SharePoint works with other Microsoft solutions, such as IIS and SQL Server, but the downside to that is that it also creates dependencies on Microsoft solutions, Creese said. SharePoint provides templates for ease of use, but if you don't map to those templates, then you have to rely on custom coding to make it work.
Other improvements to SharePoint 2007 include a rich client to create fill-in forms and a content management system that is complementary to many best-of-breed enterprise content management systems, Creese said.
Weak or missing features in SharePoint include lack of offline support, poor records management, digital asset management, social networking software, back-end XML syndication and lack of a universal taxonomy agent, he added. Consequently, organizations using SharePoint may want to seek partner solutions to fill in those gaps.
SharePoint Partner Solutions
Another panel at Catalyst was a "SharePoint Partner Roundtable" discussion by five companies that collaborate with Microsoft on the product. All told, Microsoft has "more than 2,700 partners" building on top of SharePoint, according to Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft's general manager for the office business platform, as stated in a June 2008 Microsoft Webinar.
One partner, Exostar, provides SharePoint in a software-as-a-service model, building in security for its aerospace and defense contractor clients. Exostar uses end-to-end encryption to meet government requirements and object-level reporting to track all events. The company integrates SharePoint with Active Directory and is helping its large customers prepare to do content sharing using federation techniques. Exostar relies on a partner to enable synchronization in SharePoint.
SchemaLogic works in the unstructured content metadata space. The company provides a family of connectors that work with the predominant search engines and enterprise content management repositories. Its services include a metadata model that can transcend SharePoint's scale and that also supports client-specific taxonomies.
NewsGator Technologies provides a Facebook-like experience in the enterprise, supporting social networking in conjunction with SharePoint. The user interface can be made more interactive and communications are enabled using mini-business cards in SharePoint.
Cisco Systems provides security for SharePoint deployments through its Securent acquisition. Securent provides an XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language)-based entitlement management solution to enable governance and externalize policies from SharePoint.
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