SharePoint is awesome isn’t it? Every day we see projects and business challenges that SharePoint helps us overcome. It’s kind of hard not to begin reactively saying “SharePoint” as the answer to so many corporate challenges especially as our understanding of what the platform can do matures. This poses a very real danger as SharePoint is not the best tool or solution for every challenge.
The truth is that we instinctively reach for what we know, and what we know works. SharePoint may do many things, but it tends to work quickly and efficiently at solving an immediate problem. What it often cannot handle is when our requirements and scope increase exponentially after we fix our immediate problem. This is especially true when we don’t take the time to re-evaluate whether SharePoint is only part of the truly scalable solution.
To build on the silver bullet analogy: A silver bullet is useless without a gun. The gun (as Dux Sy and others suggest) is the complex problem and often involves the plan and other components of our solution. What I really want to talk about is the importance of avoiding this pitfall of thinking in ‘SharePoint’ terms without taking a step back periodically to examine the known requirements, expectations, and scale considerations.
Contacts Scope Creep Example:
What follows is a (true) concrete example of this problem in action.
Sales Director: “Hey Richard is there a way we can organize and share our sales contacts?”
Richard: “Absolutely! Let me just create a contact list for you in SharePoint and add your team to it. That way you can all use the features of SharePoint like version history, alerting and even workflow to help you all work with your sales contacts more effectively!”
Seconds later…
Sales Director: “This looks fantastic! It works great and is exactly what I was looking for!”
A few days pass and the Sales Director comes back.
Sales Director: “Hey Richard this contacts thing works great. Is there a way for us to also tell who each contact is a little better though? As an example we often think of our contacts in terms of whether they are a ‘lead’, ‘opportunity’ or ‘account’. Would there be any way for us to assign each contact a ‘category’ like that?”
Richard: “Absolutely! Let me just create a new choice column for you that has those values. This way you can use the datasheet view to adjust the existing contacts and categorize them. Any new ones will have this as a required field which will force people to put in a value when they add it.”
Seconds later…
Sales Director: “That is perfect! I love SharePoint! Thanks!”
A few hours pass and the Sales Director comes back.
Sales Director: “You won’t believe what I just did! It’s brilliant! I really love this SharePoint thing! I used the same steps you used to create my own list called ‘Accounts’ and then added columns like you did that help me know where the headquarters is and important information for each account. Now I was wondering if you could help me connect the lists so that when they choose a contact as an account they pick the appropriate account so it’s easy to go back and forth between them.”
Richard: “Sure that is easy to do. We just need to add a lookup column to the list you built.”
Seconds later…
Richard: “There we go!”
At this point you probably can see where this is going. The requests continue to come (more frequently as expectations grow). Small at first but then they stack up. Eventually you are building a system to manage sales contacts and relationships between contacts, accounts, and the sales funnel.
In this circumstance once this was realized, the system that was being built in SharePoint, was replaced with Microsoft Dynamics CRM (the pattern and concern were recognized before it was too late), but it’s important to know when/where that tipping point is.
When should we take a step back and ask: What is available in a robust platform or product designed for this purpose and how does that compare against the way we are trying to solve it in SharePoint?
There are many examples of things that SharePoint performs poorly or doesn’t do well (depending on your perspective and opinion). That is why Microsoft has quite a few other products that work with SharePoint.
That is also why there is such a huge partner ecosystem. In fact here is (an outdated) snapshot of some of the SharePoint vendors that are out there (don’t worry the point isn’t to try and read it all – the point is just to understand that there are partners and vendors that focus on very different things):
The fact that the ecosystem is so rich indicates that there are many business needs that are being met by the products these vendors create. Still don’t believe me? For every $1 spent on a SharePoint license $6-$9 additional dollars are spent on services (http://digitalwpc.com/Videos/AllVideos/Permalink/efc1bbbf-123a-45bc-8145-c08545e29f2c#fbid=iLkn4-CZvnU – 1:54 minutes in).
So it’s clear that SharePoint isn’t a silver bullet to corporate challenges alone. It is also clear that it’s important to know when to use SharePoint and when not to use SharePoint. Here are a few more examples that (in my opinion)
SharePoint doesn’t do ‘well’:
High frequency transactional business process automation:
Image capture and automation:
Digital (rich-media) asset management:
External social (anything):
I am sure there are many more (would love to hear your thoughts), but what’s important is recognizing that SharePoint isn’t that perfect silver bullet (at least not yet).
Fellow SharePoint Experts: Remember that even though you understand; it is easy for many others to fall into the trap of perceiving SharePoint (or any technology) as a silver bullet. It’s your job to be the gunsmiths of the world and share your own experiences, expertise, and knowledge so that the business can be armed and ready to face those truly scary corporate challenges.