How to drive value from Sharepoint and the Microsoft platform

• Why is it that informationworkers spend their whole day working with software they find less attractive than the software they use for personal matters, such as Facebook?
• How many of your business solutions achieved Web 2.0'esque viral adoption in the target organization? How may employees got really excited about the opportunity in the new IT solution?

For the past 5 years all I've really been doing is to try to piece the Microsoft platform puzzle together for a wide range of customers. I've tried to the best of my ability to use the enormous potential of the Microsoft platform to deliver exciting solutions, but I still have the feeling of not reaching the target quite yet.

My newest venture with Puzzlepart is all about helping businesses capitalizing on the resource of the platform, and I want to elaborate a bit more on my thoughts and backgrounders on this subject.

In my consulting experience I've seen a lot of recurring gaps in the platform. Some are weaknesses; some are just open spaces ready to be filled with business functionality. This is the way the Microsoft platform is intended to be, and leaves the rest up to ISVs and consultancies to figure out. When they don't, end-users get really discouraged.

(Update: Craig Roths Sharepoint: It's Not a Gap, It's Room for an Ecosystem)

Fortunately there are a lot of really creative people and companies out there who are continuously working to make business software better, in order to allow businesses to operate more efficiently. And that's what it's all about: Making businesses more effective with the use of IT.

I think much of the answer is in getting to the right business questions. Let me exemplify:

One of the reflections I did after having participated in several Sharepoint 2003 and MOSS 2007 projects, was that user adoption tended to be a tough nut to crack. Another was that very few customers were concerned with measuring the effectiveness of the solution empirically after the implementation. "Just get that new IT solution in place and somebody probably will use it".

Back in 2006 I wrote an initial spec for a Sharepoint based solution I called "Intranet Adoption Dashboard", and we did a POC for it. The idea was to load usage statistics from Sharepoint into a small SQL Server Analysis Services data mart and correlate that information in the cube against organizational information from Active Directory or an HR system. Unfortunately (in my opinion) customers didn't want to pay for it, and no 3rd party vendor were offering such a solution at the time.

Having an Adoption dashboard would significantly improve and organizations ability to follow up on the usage patterns of the intranet, and not only from an intranet-page-and-area perspective, but also a organizational perspective, and in that way, ask more important business questions:

"Why is the sales department really active, while HR never visits the intranet at all?"

or

 "Check out Chuck; he's the most successful Sales Rep. and he's also the most active user of our portal. Wow! Could the other sales reps do better if they were encouraged to get with the program?"

Fortunately, since then, Nintex have built a very similar solution to the Adoption Dashboard called Nintex Reporting which gives you a lot of this type of value.

Consultancies who are delivering Sharepoint solutions should embrace these kinds of products and package them with services telling the customer:

"We bet that we'll be able to increase your intranet usage with 50% in 1 year if you follow our advice with Sharepoint and these great 3rd party tools. All you have to do is let us help you with the agile evolution of your intranet for this one year!"

So now we got the customers asking the right questions, and we got the consultants helping them with answers (process and technical). Then what's the problem? In my opinion it is close to impossible to deliver a reasonably complex Sharepoint solution of high quality that excites users without great 3rd party products. With too much custom development the TCO just won't add up. In spite of that, a lot of customers reject the notion of anything but Microsoft branded software.

This week I attended the Norwegian Sharepoint Community meeting in Oslo. The topic was metadata management with Sharepoint. 3rd party add-ons were demonstrated and discussed among the Sharepoint professionals. Several had the experience of customers declining to buy 3rd party software on the grounds of price or "the vendor is too small" (aka risky). Peter Crook from Steria was wondering why customers won't pay $20k for a product from a small vendor, but they will gladly pay a single local consultant the same amount to create a custom solution.

Which will be better documented? Which will be better supported in 2 years? Quite clearly the 3^rd party product. The decision of buying "only Microsoft (and quite a few consulting hours)" will never cost you your job. Making a bad 3rd party vendor selection might.

In saying this, and coming from a consultancy background, I want to join Mike Fitzmaurice in saying: "Do the math: Third party Add-Ons are your friend"

So what has all of this to do with me leaving consultancy to establish Puzzlepart?

Obviously, as I'm about to participate in creating products, these opinions are timely in that manner:)  But; I've made this choice because I'm dead serious about starting to ask the right business questions, and answering them in a way that delivers measurable results. To accomplish that goal I needed to "go products". A business system geared for products is required to deliver the quality needed in this arena. The business model and production systems of consultancies will either be too expensive or won't reach the quality standards.

We need more people working on truly great business solutions that excite users on the robust platforms delivered by the big vendors. We need consultancies to help implement these solutions, through configuration of platform, and assembly of 3rd party products with very high quality. And we need strong 3rd party product vendors to deliver that high quality innovation that make business solutions excite users and spread virally within businesses like Facebook and the likes have done amongst you and your friends.

That's the challenge. And hopefully Puzzlepart will contribute piece by piece and part by part to get there in the coming years.