Is there life without Sharepoint?

A few weeks ago I spent the entirety of an entirely beautiful Saturday cooped up in a Microsoft building in Alpharetta, GA with 200 or so Sharepoint integration partners and Microsoft representatives, with the goal of coming away with a greater knowledge of Sharepoints capabilities relative to the myriad of open source technologies we are likely to employ in our projects, chief among them Alfresco. How do they compare? What silver bullets does Microsoft possess to put Alfresco in its place? I still don't know, and I am pretty sure Microsoft doesn't either. I make this leap after asking more than several people at the event how they thought Alfresco stood up to Sharepoint. None had ever even heard of Alfresco, and equally remarkable, none could present a cogent explanation of what was better about Sharepoint 2010 than previous versions. Don't get me wrong, I am sure there are “things” that are better.

To be fair, I did find a list of 2010 improvements online in a blog by “Sharepoint Joel”, many of which where mentioned at the aforementioned wasted Saturday. Hold on to your seats, this is some earth shattering transformational stuff, and clearly, your enterprise won't survive without it. http://tiny.cc/dbshu

Ah, but I did learn one thing of value... while the new 2010 offering is “better”, “really”, the Sharepoint 2010 BPOS cloud offering has a significantly truncated feature set. So I sacrificed my gorgeous Spring [ the season ] day to bring you this take away.

Similarly, Russell Stalters, BP's Director of Information & Records posts in his “Better ECM” blog, his similar frustration with a lack of knowledge transfer around Sharepoint he experienced at 2010 AIIM Expo and Conference in Philadelphia last month, this despite Microsoft's utter dominance of the event, which is the pinnacle yearly conference for all things information management ( http://tiny.cc/fffaq ). Microsoft is living in a bubble with Sharepoint, albeit a very large bubble, and one not likely to pop any time soon, but there is life without Sharepoint, yet it exists only in an alternate universe that is only now being discovered.