Beware Microsoft Baggage

Although SharePoint 2007 supports Web services and has hooks to data sources such as SAP R3 to pull information into central repositories (which it calls business data catalogues), using SharePoint fundamentally requires that you have a strong Microsoft core in place, notes Apollo Group's Mildenhall. "Even if you're not a Microsoft shop, you still need to use Office and Exchange," he says, and not using Active Directory will limit your security and access management controls as well.

The upside to buying into Microsoft's goal of becoming a strategic component of your enterprise infrastructure is that "nothing else leverages Office and Active Directory as SharePoint does", he says. And SharePoint also ties in well to Microsoft's .Net and Visual Studio development tools to let IT make enhancements, says Definition6's Hernacki.

As you connect non-Microsoft technologies to SharePoint, you can expect a bumpier ride. That's a big downside for many IT shops. For example, at Bryan Cave, it "took a lot of work" to get SharePoint to integrate with the Recommind search system, Alber says. Primitive Logic's Lin says his consultancy "struggled to get EMC Documentum working with SharePoint because the SharePoint interfaces are not so good". But Lin notes that IBM's FileNet integrates more easily with SharePoint. Christopher Martini, Primitive Logic's Microsoft practice head, adds that SharePoint alternatives such as SAP's MySAP portal also require reliance on a proprietary core or lots of custom code.

Ultimately, CIOs must ask themselves whether they want to bring Microsoft to the core of their collaboration and perhaps content management, BI, and search strategies, says Forrester's Koplowitz. It's clear that the advances in SharePoint 2007 have caused many CIOs to look at that question again. "Any CIO should be cautious. There's a lot to MOSS that we don't know yet - for starters, how well it will scale in the real world. We'll know in the next year what its real quality is as people put it through its paces," Koplowitz says.

At Bryan Cave, Alber is not waiting. Impressed with the "robustness" of Microsoft SQL Server's recent release, he says, "Office 2007 is coming off the bus really quite advanced - there's no need to wait until Service Pack 2, as is usually the case with Microsoft." Despite having misgivings about Windows Vista, he sees these recent enterprise apps as proof that Microsoft is ready to play in the big time, and his early experiences with MOSS reinforce that belief. "I'm not seeing the same hiccups as with Microsoft in the past," he says.

Despite that enthusiasm, Alber doesn't just swallow the Microsoft Kool-Aid. "I've really tried to cherry-pick; I really try not to buy Microsoft's promises wholesale." The promise of SharePoint 2007 is strong, but the strategy of "trust but verify" remains essential, he says.