Out-of-box vs. Modular

A number of companies with products for SharePoint were recently cited in a release from Kurt Delbene, the VP of Microsoft's Office Server group, including K2.net workflow (a product of SourceCode) and CorasWorks. Kurt's release highlights the great work done by third parties to make SharePoint a great solution in a variety of settings.

I've heard criticism that SharePoint should meet these needs out of the box (why do I need a separate products for document management, records management and workflow?). I disagree. For comparison, I like Microsoft Word, but I'm glad that that Microsoft didn't try to implement all the features of v2003 back in the late 80's. Can you imagine how well that would have worked? I'm glad I learned what I need to do back in Word 5, because the steps haven't fundamentally changed. I'm looking forward to Office 12 because it's a refactoring of the Office Suite which is long overdue.

Give me a core set of features that work, that I can wrap my head around, and leave the niche work to third parties so I can be selective about how I build out. Modular is good. You want it all in one big box? Knock yourself out and pay extra for features you'll never use. If you'd rather first figure out how the business should work and then select the tools to execute well, then I know you have your priorities in order.

So doesn't Office 12 Server (aka SharePoint v3) try to do it all? It has document management, records management, contet managment, workflow, and more out-of-box. Well of course, that's evolution, and SharePoint is becoming a mature product. If they tried to do these things sooner (and MS Content Management Server is a good example), the migration path forward to what O12 will deliver would have been terrible. MCMS will migrate data smoothly, but the presentation layer will need to be rewritten to take advantage of the new architecture. At least the benefits will be tangible, and in the meantime existing installations can run merrily on the existing version of MCMS just as classic ASP sites still abound.

If the MCMS scenario was also occuring for document management, records management, workflow, credential stores, and the rest, we'd have blood in the streets. As it is, we've had an evolution, not a revolution. The future is rosy. The future is modular.