Auto pricing publisher Kelley Blue Book is a typical example of why the management functionality is important, analysts and consultants say. Kelley's IT staff had deployed the previous version of SharePoint to create departmental intranet sites and workspaces as needed for various projects - and within a couple of years, about 100 separate sites had arisen. (Forrester analyst Koplowitz says he's seen some companies with tens of thousands of SharePoint sites in place. "'Wild' is the polite word for that situation," he says.)

The sheer number of siloed locations made information management difficult, as people no longer knew where to look for information or where to place it, recalls CIO Justin Yaros. But SharePoint 2003 didn't allow for cross-site search or access management, so IT had no way to assert control over the proliferation. MOSS now brings that control, he notes, which is why he plans to adopt the technology.

But now there's also confusion among IT professionals regarding what SharePoint actually does, since Microsoft has stuffed in analytics, search, Office-based forms and workflow automation, and content management capabilities into the previous file sharing, calendar management and site management features. "You can work it into almost anything," says Trent Parkhill, director of IT services for consultancy Haley & Aldrich, which makes it hard to know where to start.

In examining SharePoint's fit, CIOs also need to consider a few downsides to the product. The new SharePoint search, enterprise content management (ECM) and business intelligence (BI) functions may not be robust enough for large enterprises. Also, using SharePoint most effectively requires much other Microsoft baggage, including Office, Exchange and Active Directory.

Strategy Should Be Incremental

CIOs should resist Microsoft's pitch for SharePoint as a solution for everything and instead match specific issues they have to specific SharePoint capabilities, then start with the most pressing of those, says Paul Hernacki, CTO of consultancy Definition6. "You quickly get overwhelmed if you try to build a strategy around all its capabilities," says Joe Mildenhall, CIO of Apollo Group, an education provider best known for the University of Phoenix. "It should be a phased approach," advises Forrester's Koplowitz.

In practical terms, that means starting small with SharePoint, using it first to corral any existing SharePoint sites and workspaces and take advantage of cross-site search, then integrate it with Active Directory for security and access controls, says Andy Lin, ECM senior director at consultancy Primitive Logic. Then consider building out new sites and workspaces with SharePoint, perhaps replacing existing sites over time to provide a common user interface and reduce IT's support burden, suggests Haley & Aldrich's Parkhill. Analysts and consultants agree that the core SharePoint capabilities - file sharing, site management and other collaboration aspects - are where most companies will and should focus their SharePoint efforts.

After that, companies' deployment strategies will likely diverge, based on the tools they have in place. Many will take advantage of SharePoint's workflow automation capabilities to reduce labour across forms-oriented processes such as expense reporting. You can also use its Excel 2007-driven analytics capabilities to bring basic BI to more employees, says Burton Group's Hobert.

Apollo Group is following just such a strategy, notes CIO Mildenhall, using SharePoint first for its intranet sites and workspaces, and then exploring the workflow and content management tools' capabilities. So is Kelley Blue Book, notes CIO Yaros. Bryan Cave's Alber calls this an incremental approach: "We reveal a little SharePoint at a time until we have exposed it all," he says. He expects his SharePoint strategy to span several years and fully expects Microsoft to have a new version shipping before he is done.