Chapter 1: SharePoint Business Solutions

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 represents the latest stage in an ongoing workplace evolution that began with the company intranet. This evolutionary process has taken us from simple static HTML pages through dynamic Active Server Pages (ASP) and then Enterprise Information Portals. Throughout this process, the business value of portal technology has not always been clear, but end users have always sensed a level of simplicity within the portal concept that promised a better technology experience. It is the pursuit of this simplicity that has driven the portal market since the mid-1990s.

A Brief History of Portals

My first experience with the Internet was in the early 1990s. I was working for a consulting company writing a traditional fat-client Visual Basic 3.0 application when a colleague called me over to his computer. Although at the time I did not understand, on his screen was an early Internet search engine. He asked me excitedly to watch while he typed in some obscure topic like "Japanese Cuisine." To my amazement a list of documents appeared. He clicked one of the documents and showed me the history of Japanese cooking in America. I was amazed and asked him what application he was running. He said that it wasn't an application; it was the Internet.

That experience opened my eyes not only to the power of the Internet, but to the value of a simplified user interface that places information at your fingertips. These early search engines were really the genesis of the portal market, and that vision influences many of the solutions that we create today. In fact, it was the Internet search engines that first coined the term portal. These engines were supposed to be your first stop on the information superhighway.

Intranets

Business organizations were quick to latch on to the idea of the portal. If a search engine worked well on the Internet, then it would also work well for finding information within an organization. Thus the intranet was born.

Early intranet projects represented a significant effort by corporate America to organize information and simplify retrieval. It was not long before most organizations had an intranet site. Typically, these sites were adorned with photos of the company president and a reprint of the current company newsletter. Unfortunately, these intranet sites were built using static content. This meant that a human being had to be responsible for updating the content periodically ”a task that turned out to be much more difficult than anyone had originally predicted .

People assigned the task of updating the intranet had to collect information from a variety of sources, assemble that information, and publish it. Often this work required specialized graphics or programming skills that were not readily available within the organization. Soon, updating the intranet became a fulltime job. Organizations even went so far as to hire dedicated personnel to maintain these sites.

Often the effort to maintain the intranet site would fail. After a few months, the company headlines and newsletter would remain unchanged as personnel were reassigned and priorities changed. Once the content became stale, end users stopped using the intranet. Enthusiasm waned and the effort was abandoned . Today, most organizations have at least one of these intranet sites that still has the company newsletter from 1997 posted on the home page.

Even though many intranet efforts resulted in failure, organizations continued to believe in the concept of browser-based access to information. The faith of these organizations was grounded in the belief that centralizing information and systems would reduce the total cost of ownership and improve productivity. The intranet failure was attributed to the fact that software development was not the business of these organizations. In order to achieve the promise offered by browsers and portals, organizations would have to turn to software vendors .

Application Portals

In the mid- to late 1990s most software vendors were creating and selling client - server applications. These applications were designed to have a client program installed on the local computer that drew information from a centralized database server. Software vendors, however, were beginning to feel the pressure to create browser-based versions of their products. They were also well aware of the marketing buzz surrounding the use of the word portal .

What followed was a significant effort, which is still ongoing, to create these browser-based applications. In nearly all cases where software vendors have created browser-based versions of their applications, they have called them portals. For our purposes, however, this term is inaccurate because most of the products lack the flexibility to truly serve as a portal for an organization. Instead, I will refer to these products as Application Portals.

Enterprise Information Portals

As the Internet bubble continued to expand and "irrational exuberance" gained hold, a new breed of software vendor emerged with a generic portal offering. These generic portals were not built to target a specific application but were intended to be a centralized place for all documents, information, and application access. In order to achieve this generic vision, portal vendors created small programmable units from which you could build any portal you wanted. These small units had lots of clever names that still exist today: parts , nuggets, gadgets, and so on. By the late 1990s, these portal vendors were doing big business migrating entire suites of company applications into the portal. For our purposes, I will refer to these types of portals as Enterprise Information Portals.

Enterprise Information Portals had several flaws that ultimately curtailed their adoption. The first, and most serious, is that they were rushed to market. Because the products were rushed, they were often unstable and always required significant amounts of consulting service work to get them up and running. Enterprise Information Portal projects were always measured in months and sometimes in years .

The second flaw was that many of the vendors mistakenly believed that the Enterprise Information Portal had to ship with document management, collaboration, and customer management features built in. This often led to conflicts within an organization over the fate of existing systems. Customers were often under the impression that they would be stuck using all of the portal features even if they were inferior to their current systems. These flaws led to a sudden stop in the Enterprise Information Portal space. This stop then resulted in consolidation of portal vendors and a reworking of the portal vision.

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server

Today you can still find examples of all of the various portal offerings. Intranets, Application Portals, and Enterprise Information Portals are still being used, and several vendors are still in business selling these products. The vision, however, has narrowed. Most vendors are no longer touting a complete integration of all company systems. Instead, vendors are focused on smaller accomplishments such as improved collaboration or communication. This is the world in which Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server finds itself.

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server does not fit neatly into any of the categories I have previously discussed. The primary reason for this is that Microsoft still has a significant commitment to the desktop. In all of the previous portal incarnations, vendors were interested in supplanting the desktop. Microsoft wants to enhance the desktop because it is a significant source of revenue. No one at Microsoft wants to see users move to browser-based computing en masse. Furthermore, Microsoft also has a significant investment in the Office suite. Together the operating system and the Office suite represent a huge part of the Microsoft empire.

As a result, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server is a hybrid solution that bridges browser-based and client-server concepts. The portal is used to provide collaboration, document management, and searching in harmony with the Microsoft Office suite. Documents located in the portal, for example, are opened, read, and edited with Microsoft Word. Meetings created in the portal are scheduled using Microsoft Outlook. This hybrid solution results in a highly decentralized environment designed to empower the end users to collaborate without restriction. It is indeed a compelling vision, but one that may challenge many organizations that are more comfortable with centralized, " locked-down " desktops.