As we've already touched on earlier in the book, SharePoint is a product that can be a challenge to define, and the reality is that SharePoint has different meanings to different people. This is why we have described SharePoint as the "Ginsu knife" (an icon of "hard sell" marketing as a knife that can do almost anything) of web platforms because, depending on its application, individuals will perceive the product differently. While SharePoint can perform a lot of functions, the following descriptions of SharePoint are not a good fit for its true capabilities and prescriptive use, and thinking of it in any of the following ways should be avoided.
There is a lot of buzz within the IT world surrounding SharePoint, and it does not help to have a keen person always stating, 'SharePoint can solve this' to understand if this is the appropriate technology. If SharePoint is customized enough, it can meet your required business needs. But, this is not the best use of people's time and effort, and in reality, without some customization SharePoint will not provide the benefits of an advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application. So, before you open up SharePoint in your browser, think about what your specific business problem is and how it can be solved.
If your company is looking for a very sophisticated document management system or a CRM application that is unique to an industry, SharePoint may not be the best tool without customization or a third-party add-on.
Yes, SharePoint does have very good document management functionality, but its functionality is geared towards the majority of users' needs in an organization, rather than one or two individual's specific requirements. This is so there is broader appeal to the technology within an organization.
The whole SharePoint architecture is based on customizable templates such as Sites, Lists, and Libraries. The moment that SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio is required for a project or task, the deployment should be viewed as an actual project, and a project manager will be required for help with development, staging servers, documentation, and perhaps a maintenance plan.
Because functionality can be performed by an end user, there is often the notion among business users that'this is the web so anything is possible'. This creates the tendency to endlessly refine and make changes to the look and feel of field types and displayed information.
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A department does not request that IT change the UI colors for Outlook so it is branded with the corporate colors, or insist that the interface is redesigned so the tool bar is at the bottom of the page and menu links can go three levels deep. This is a common request for a SharePoint site, so managing these expectations is key to delivering projects within specific time frames.
With implementations such as a CRM or ERP system where there is a hard release date, and once the application has gone live, there is a freeze on requested functionality. Released SharePoint functionality in most organizations is constantly tweaked even after the go live phase.
This is not a good approach to an IT project. However, this is a common practice with SharePoint functionality releases and should aim to be minimized as far as possible.
Information can be tagged and selected together, but this is not the right tool for shopping cart transaction user activity with credit card actions without a lot of development customization.
SharePoint provides the presentation layer for graphs and charts, and with its out of the box functionality, it can connect to a data source that could be an SQL cube or a list. SharePoint will not build or refresh the cube, or design the report.
People will often say,'That's in SharePoint', referring to a graph displaying information from another database. In most cases though, SharePoint acts as a presentation layer to capture a graph from another application. An end user can easily capture web pages displaying cubes and graphs with the Page Viewer web part. For the more advanced user, Business Intelligence Center is more appropriate.
SharePoint will complement the BI functionality that is provided with other tools, rather than provide the functions of these tools itself.
The Edit in Datasheet functionality of a SharePoint list provides an Excel-like look and feel, which does work for basic information in a cell-like format. This is not a replacement for Excel's cell formulas and flexibility to manipulate data and forecasting models.
You may be surprised by this particular statement, but if your company is small and with mostly static content, and has not purchased the public connector licenses required, then SharePoint may not be a financially viable web technology.
When a public facing site is designed on the SharePoint platform, there are a lot more unknown variables such as browser formats, mobile devices, and search engine optimization, which can require a skilled team to maintain. However, with a company intranet environment, browser standards and devices can be enforced by the organization.
Significant customizations are required to make a SharePoint site look like a typical website.
Another challenge with public facing websites is that when pages do not load properly or functionally does not work, the website visitors generally do not notify the company that something is not working, unlike an intranet that has a content owner, or a help desk ticketing process to assist with feedback and troubleshooting.
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Furthermore, if your company already has a company website set up with something else, why do a rip and replace of the technology?
Clearly for internal websites, SharePoint is the perfect tool.
SharePoint is a web platform that will require manpower and effort to configure, but if there is a business process or something unique to a requirement, it will take some effort to have this functional in SharePoint. As you can see from reading this book, much can be done by the user without development, but this will require both learning SharePoint's functionality and understanding how to makes changes to it.
There is a perception by senior management in companies that SharePoint is a turnkey solution, and that once it is installed, benefits can be achieved in minutes. This may have something to do with the sales process, or that technology companies tend to focus on their solutions with SharePoint, rather than the process of implementing them.
While an accounting system upgrade will have a go live date where on a defined day all the invoices will be processed in the new system, SharePoint does not generally work like this, partly because people can use existing processes such as e-mail or the phone to perform their current tasks that SharePoint can also do.
So, during and after the go live release, users must still be constantly nurtured and educated to use the application, and will be questioned as to why they are not using it.