Sharepoint followup 1: Why Sharepoint projects fail
As promised, some additional links for people, this time from Cleverworkarounds.com, a blog authored by an Australian system administrator who has written a series on why Sharepoint projects fail.
He comes at it in very much the same fashion as my presentation, but directed towards a more technical audience.
Some of his observations about Sharepoint are really worth considering. For example, he compares Sharepoint to the new security product (Active Directory) which was launched in 2000.
What was interesting about that time was that “Active Directory”
became somewhat of a buzz word, and it was marketed as the
be-all-and-end-all of life, the universe and everything…
…fast forward 8 years and we now have a ton of collective real world
experience, a set of mature best practices, and countless books on the
subject. Active Directory projects are really not that complex at all.
But back when it first came out, there was no collective expertise, and
mistakes were made.
I have been involved with a few Active Directory revamp projects over the years, and every one of them was
a project of consolidation, clean-up and simplification from the
previous attempts at it. To this day I have never been called in to increase the complexity of an Active Directory to solve business issues.
Why am I telling you all this? Quite simple really, SharePoint is
still in the hype stage, real world experience is still lacking, but
more importantly, best practices are not mature. This
is not helped by the way Microsoft and partners market the product.
Right now, that is also very similar to Active Directory in 1999-2001.
It’s a good series of articles, and required reading for your technology folks. The above exerpt piece comes from Part 4.
- Why do SharePoint Projects Fail? – Part 1
- Why do SharePoint Projects Fail? – Part 2
- Why do SharePoint Projects Fail – Part 3
- Why do SharePoint Projects Fail? Part 4
Hope it’s useful for you.
Update:
