Jaa

Why SharePoint was such a runaway success

  • Artikkeli

SharePoint is in the "leader" quadrant in the Gartner's analysis. Apparently SharePoint is the most successful product we ever released in terms of licenses sold in the shortest period of time following its lauch. 

Except for Halo2 that is.. but hey thats not fair :-) It just shows what a diverse business we run here. In fact, while I'm on this digression, it always amused me and struck me as kind of cool that Cluster server used to include settings in control panel for a joystick! - not sure if Windows Compute Cluster Edition still has but it just goes to show how wide our market has become

Why was SharePoint so successful though? I think it came down to getting the combination of capabilities absolutely right. SharePoint was essentially three things in a box:

  • a portal
  • document management
  • search

Customers would typically want the product because they really wanted to solve one of these three problems. The genius of it though was that once they bought it they found that they also really needed the other two points. This is because these solutions spill over into each other. If you have a document management system its not much use if you can't find the documents again later. If you can work with documents, you next want to work with other people on them and create team sites and portals to navigate them. The problems always came together so putting them all in one box meant customers always got more value than they were expecting.

It strikes me this is also what we are doing with 2007 Office on the server side. There are a number of problems we will be able to address with Office that nobody ever though of using Office to solve before, like business intelligence and compliance. Just like with SharePoint, these solutions overlap and spill over into each other. Just as the desktop suite was created across the already successful applications to innovate in an integrated way through successive versions, we are doing the same on the server with 2007.

The beauty of the Office system is in its integration. We have, technically speaking, a very elegant architecture now. We have SharePoint Server bringing together everything good about SharePoint Portal Server and Content Management Server in one box. We have everything built on the same platform; Windows Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Windows Workflow Foundation. Everything is XML, fully described and exposed as webservices. It is a very clean model and platform for solutions.

Customers will implement Office for different reasons and on the server side, to solve different problems but expect, just like with SPS, they will quickly start to get value from the related solution areas because the integration is there out of the box. 

To put it simply, we've done Office on the desktop. In 2007 we will do it to the server too.

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