Kong and The Killer SharePoint App

I recently picked up the 2-Disc Special Edition of King Kong. This is the original 1933 grandaddy of them all, not the crappy 1976 POS from Dino De Laurentiis. It's a great disc set for those that are fans of the genre and like this kind of stuff. What was really special was a lost sequence from the film. 

Back in the first weeks of the films release, there existed a horrifying spider pit sequence. A short sequence after the sailors are felled from the log by Kong and fall into a pit. There in the pit, prehistoric spiders and insects devour the expendable crew. After a few viewings of the film, people were said to have had fainting spells over the horrifying nature of the sequence. The director, Merian C. Cooper, took the sequence out of the film himself (citing that it didn't flow and the focus should be kept on the great ape). The sequence exists in various treatments of the script, there are a few storyboards kicking around, and in the 1970s a photo emerged of a spider from the lost sequence that never was. To this day, nobody seems to have any restored footage for the part of the film (it's said that Cooper might have actually burned the footage, as he was known to do this).

Enter Peter Jackson and Weta, the special effects magicians responsible for Lord of the Rings. Mr. Jackson is a huge fan of the original Kong (hence one of the key reasons why he's remaking it, coming out December 14). Just for "fun" the Weta team was tasked to recreate the lost spider pit sequence and patch it into the surrounding parts of the film on the DVD. They faithfully rebuilt original models (using an X-Ray from one of the only surviving models available today) and created new ones (based on sketches by Willis O'Brian for Kong) and engaged stop-motion animation, matte paintings, and other techniques used in the original Kong rather than todays typical computer animation techniques. The result is a sequence that the creators would be proud of, a seamless blend of 1932 footage with 2005 filming and gives the fans one filmakers take on what the sequence might have looked like.

As we know, SharePoint is a technology platform. It's a platform very much like the special effects world of Hollywood in the early 30s. There are endless possiblities that you can extend and expand from. The problem is that we have yet to have a wizard like Willis O'Brian come along and merge the various capabilities of SharePoint into one entity that will stop us from looking at it as a tool with missing features. Michael Ekegren, in his latest blog, wonders about what a SharePoint resource portal should or could look like and what is it you need to do with a team site? There are web parts out there today and the SharePoint technology has been around and maturing for a couple of years now, yet we're still stuck in the stone ages when it comes to usability and functionality. The landscape out there is still just a simple class of Web Parts that provide us with navigation elements to supplement SharePoints simple UI (something that is addressed with the next release).

What we're lacking is someone to come along and do what PJ and his Weta team did with Kong and fill that gap with something new, finish what was started so long ago. There must be a bigger and better use of SharePoint than just document storage and lists. Sure there are some "killer" tools like SmartPart which makes building Web Parts a breeze but that's limited to people who build things rather than use them. And yes, the next version will allow you to just drop in user controls and have them "become" Web Parts. With the release of ASP.NET 2.0 and the Web Part framework, we'll have 10 months or so of people building new Web Parts that can then be used in a SharePoint Team Site. Still, there's something we're missing here as we have a toolset that has unlimited possiblities but all we're doing with it is enhancing navigation controls.

Or maybe SharePoint itself is the killer app, and we're just too close to the trees to the see the big monkey behind it.