Forrester thinks SharePoint 2010 is an Overkill

SharePoint 2010 Forrester

I am reading a post on SFGate where they are discussing the reports by Forrester about the Overkill features of SharePoint 2010.

The study conducted by Forrester is titled "SharePoint Server 2010: An Evolutionary Step toward Content-Centric Middleware, generally gives high marks for the improvements Microsoft has made to the server, which has become one of its fastest selling products of all time. SharePoint 2010 is expected to ship in June."

The report however says that companies who see a gap in SharePoint 2007 should move to SharePoint 2010 particularly around social networking. Forrester principal analyst Rob Koplowitz, says that SharePoint 2010 should be considered a major strategic move for users who are not on SharePoint; but reminds to look at the features closely since SharePoint might be a "hammer" but not everything is a "nail".

The report ends their analysis that SharePoint 2010 may not be a fit for those that have basic needs which can be addressed by SocialText or Jive. The end-user licensing agreement should give enough room for corporations who want to build social communities across their boundaries. Also, advanced data cleansing and transformations is not the strength of SharePoint 2010 and customers may look into other technologies.

Rob's report doesn't contain all negative things on SharePoint 2010 but says the latest version addressed gaps in SharePoint 2007. He notes that Social Computing tools are now a first class citizen in SharePoint 2010. The Social Computing features shows improved support for blogs, wikis, tags, and feeds. Other improvements noted include offline client SharePoint Workspace based on Groove technology, new capabilities for developers, line-of-business integration, enhancements on search and document management.

In my post yesterday, Is SharePoint 2010 a Windows Vista in the Works, I was skeptical that the latest version of SharePoint is going to be a hitmaker, because I felt that SharePoint 2007 is fine for most implementation. I would agree with Rob's report, and I would advice businesses to take a long and hard look whether the enhancements put in SharePoint 2010 is worth the trouble of migration and disrupting the organizations road map. There are so many areas that the company could spend their money other than migrating to the new version.

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