Where SharePoint Falls Short

Note this, however: Despite the enthusiasm for SharePoint from CIOs such as Alber, Mildenhall and Yaros, none see themselves adopting all of its pieces. "It's not an end-all, be-all even though it can do a lot of things," says Yaros. "It gets you 70 percent of the way there really fast, but for the remaining 30 percent, you should look at purpose-built [third-party] tools," he adds.

Analysts and consultants agree that Microsoft's search, ECM and BI capabilities are not likely to meet enterprise needs, at least not as the main tool in use. Smaller companies may find them to be good enough. Alber came to this conclusion for Bryan Cave's search technologies, so he uses Recommind instead. Likewise, Haley & Aldrich's Parkhill uses Coveo's search engine instead of SharePoint's across the consultancy's 21 offices, even within the SharePoint intranet sites and workspaces. "It's even better to use Google Desktop to find e-mails and so on rather than use SharePoint's search tools," says Primitive Logic consultant Lin. Similarly, Bryan Cave's Alber has decided to not replace his ECM tools with SharePoint's, "though I can see those eventually displacing them".

Even if you use third-party tools for such functions, you may find value in adopting SharePoint as a front end, since its familiar Office interface can make ECM, search and BI tools more accessible to users, says Burton Group's Hobert. Kelley Blue Book's Yaros isn't sure if he'll ultimately adopt SharePoint's BI technology, but he's fairly certain he'll have SharePoint be the front end to whatever he does choose.

Likewise, Primitive Logic's Lin says many companies will find that SharePoint 2007's Office-like interface makes a good front end to sophisticated but hard-to-use ECM tools such as EMC Documentum and IBM FileNet.