If SharePoint is like Excel, it's like Excel with a rounding error
Earlier today a tweet sent me to this thoughtful article by Josh Greenbaum which argues that SharePoint should be thought of as the collaboration system equivalent of Microsoft Excel. Josh makes some strong points, mostly based on SharePoint's level of market penetration, suggesting that the system is too ubiquitous to be stopped or for other tools to really matter much.
Certainly SharePoint is the market leader, like Excel. And the army of customizers out there, ready to translate dreams of integration and ease of use into income are as happy to push the platform as the IT buyers who see a satisfied feature checklist and a well-known brand. But a better metaphor would be a version of Excel crippled by a calculation error that popped up uncontrollably throughout the system.Collaboration software requires things like meaningful integration into workflows, intuitive interfaces, and a rewarding experience for end users in order to get people to adopt it in large scale. And large scale adoption is as essential for actual use of a collaboration system as accurate math is for a spreadsheet.Spaces is designed to offer the capabilities an organization looks for once they've come to realize that the old model of enterprise-software-forced-upon-the-user doesn't work for collaboration systems. In this sense the massive penetration of SharePoint is good news for nGenera and others who try to build stuff people actually want to use, as it means a lot of companies are on the road to that realization. I dare say educating organizations around the importance of adoption issues is one of the few things SharePoint can be counted on to do well.
