One large company that is placing early bets on SharePoint is Quest Software. It is the largest sponsor of this week’s SharePoint conference in Seattle, and also offers the most third-party products that help SharePoint administrators and developers with design, implementation, migration and management challenges. The company has been actively pursuing SharePoint product acquisitions for a couple of years now, with two new acquisitions just last year. With nine SharePoint-specific products, it is obviously betting on a big pot of gold being at the end of the SharePoint rainbow — and I think it may be right.

There are a lot of smaller vendors in the SharePoint market right now. But if this space acts at all similar to the email-archiving market a few years ago – which I believe it will — we should expect to see smaller companies with innovative tools being bought by larger SharePoint players until we eventually see a handful of best-of-breed options in the market. This will likely play out over the next two to three years.

I am surprised that I haven’t seen a player like Symantec get into the game yet, but the market is still young. Cisco and HP have a presence at this year’s Microsoft SharePoint Conference though, so maybe the big honchos are starting to recognize the opportunity. We’ll have to watch and see what happens.

In over seven years of covering Microsoft technologies, I have to confess that this was my first time seeing Bill Gates speak. So that was a bit of a treat. He didn’t really have any groundbreaking news or information to share, but it was still interesting.

The most notable news announcement from the show is that Microsoft is now offering SharePoint Online and Exchange Online (currently in beta) to customers with fewer than 5,000 seats.

Most interesting to me personally was Gates’ discussion of the various levels of sophistication companies have when it comes to SharePoint deployment and usage. Ascending in complexity, they are:

• Personal Sites (My Sites)
• Collaboration Team Sites (unstructured content)
• Departmental Solutions (structured and unstructured)
• Enterprise Data Repositories (highly structured)
• Web Portals (corporate intranets and websites)

Gates said the “sweet spot” and opportunity for innovation with SharePoint really lies in the mid-range of that scale — i.e., at the department level. He may be right, but I think the challenge with that is ownership.There is a lot of obvious excitement about Microsoft’s SharePoint product and adoption rates are impressive. But customers still seem to be trying to figure out what exactly can be done with it. Many are using basic functionality like sites, but they haven’t developed sophisticated infrastructures yet that really leverage all their existing informational assets within the SharePoint framework. In fact, it seems like many companies still think of SharePoint as a portal when MOSS 2007 now really offers much more.

Kurt Delbene, a senior vice president at Microsoft, said three quarters of the Fortune 100 are currently using SharePoint. With enterprise-level companies like Ford, General Mills, and Viacom using SharePoint, there is obviously the potential for sophisticated SharePoint implementation. The question in my mind is how do companies go beyond vanilla deployments to reach that level of sophistication when SharePoint administration in so many companies is still virtually non-existent and/or completely decentralized?

During the keynote, a slide was presented that showed three different pie slices of users:

• Power users — SharePoint site templates and site customization
• Designers and analysts — SharePoint Designer, Office InfoPath, Office Access
• Professional developers — Visual Studio

I have talked to dozens of administrators in SharePoint shops that basically only have the “power user” part of the SharePoint trinity outlined above. Many companies have “hidden” SharePoint sites being run by department-level staff that central IT isn’t even aware of. Until SharePoint sites within organizations are owned by a central IT entity instead of being a distributed system of untracked sites and servers run by maverick and self-made SharePoint admins, any true leveraging of the product’s capabilities will not happen.  

If companies truly want to maximize SharePoint’s collaborative potential, the ownership issue is the first one that must be resolved. Furthermore connecting departments and achieving innovative department-level uses of SharePoint cannot happen until there is C-level strategic ownership of SharePoint as a major business initiative.

I think we’ll get there. Microsoft now offers a SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool and SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool that will help achieve those kinds of objectives. Third-party vendors are also trying to answer that call. But we are still in the early stages of where SharePoint is going, in my opinion. Much more education and ownership needs to happen before its true potential will be realized.

On a side note, the Bill Gates’ Last Day at Microsoft video was probably the most entertaining portion of the entire keynote. It’s old news, since it already premiered at the Consumer Electronics Show a couple months ago. But it’s pretty darn funny if for some reason you haven’t seen it yet.

As I explain on my About page, the goal of this blog is to observe the evolving dynamics of collaboration technology from an IT perspective and from the end-user perspective; to explore the successful use of collaboration products; and to offer opinions, best practices and advice that will further the cause of and increase the clarity of collaboration’s role in the workplace.

There’s a lot of buzz in the collaboration space right now around unified communications, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), and IBM’s collaboration products like Lotus Notes Domino, Sametime and Quickr. With all the new products versions on the scene, this year promises to be filled with many developments in the collaboration arena.

In fact, we seem to be witnessing a huge surge of innovation and interest in the collaboration space. The market is young, but I expect it to mature rapidly, similarly to how the email-archiving market has developed over the past three years.  

MOSS and WSS adoption is taking off like a rocket. The first Microsoft SharePoint Conference, taking place in Seattle, Wash. the first week of March, is sold out and anticipation is high in the SharePoint blogosphere. I will be blogging from the show, so I’ll be sure to share any juicy tidbits I uncover.  

On the IBM Lotus front, the annual Lotusphere 2008 conference just wrapped up a few weeks ago and the Lotus Notes Domino community is still buzzing from the excitement at the show. Everyone in the Domino blogosphere seems pumped about version 8 of Lotus Notes Domino. IBM’s new Quickr product, which will compete with Microsoft SharePoint as document management and team collaboration application, is generating a lot of enthusiasm as well.

I look forward to experiencing the growth of the collaboration market that’s here and ahead, and hope you will join me for the journey. Thanks for visiting my blog.