Companies increasingly need technical help to get the most out of Microsoft's multifaceted tool.

Microsoft introduced SharePoint earlier this decade as a tool for facilitating business collaboration, but thanks to a series of revisions and new features, it's becoming a rapidly growing force in the document management sector.

A combination of easy integration with ubiquitous Microsoft Office applications and low licensing costs is boosting sales of the SharePoint platform, which to varying degrees can handle everything from managing and sharing documents to supporting Web portals. "SharePoint is very accessible from Microsoft Office so companies don't need to go to an entirely new environment in order to purchase document management and collaboration" tools, says Jim Murphy, research director for AMR Research.

Microsoft reported earlier this year that SharePoint licenses had surpassed 100 million seats and account for more than $1 billion in revenues. Spurring sales is the software's relatively low cost, which can make it easier for organizations to justify an enterprise content management (ECM) project. Murphy says SharePoint's $71 per-user list price significantly undercuts the $300 to $400 price tag of other ECM and document management systems.

Customization challenges

However, some organizations are finding SharePoint a solution without a clear picture of how it fits into organizations, content-management researcher CMS Watch says in "SharePoint Report 2008," a new analysis of the product (see http://www.cmswatch.com/SharePoint/Report/). "SharePoint is a collection of individual components that interact to varying degrees, but require extra work to weld into a cohesive package," the report says. "Unfortunately, not all components of SharePoint are created equal. In other words, SharePoint is well suited to some requirements, but certainly not all."

In addition, CMS Watch notes that while SharePoint gives end users "a simple (and deservedly popular) file-sharing experience" when users decide to customize or extend these out-of-the-box capabilities, "the sheer breadth and depth of the contemporary SharePoint [2007] stack make it more difficult to customize than previous versions."

Development help

For solution providers trained in SharePoint development, these issues can be a source of new professional services business. Sweetening the opportunity are the development tools in the latest version, which offer additional help in customization projects, according to CMS Watch.

In particular, "an extensive set of class libraries and Web services provide great opportunity for custom development, on top of the extensible WSS [Windows SharePoint Services] libraries," CMS Watch says. Microsoft also includes two software development kits with the current product. "For the more novice developer or power administrator, many (but not all) SharePoint services can be configured in a browser-based interface," the analyst firm says.

The need for company-specific SharePoint customization and its growing complexity requires IT expertise at the start of implementation projects, as well as during subsequent expansions of the platform's role. "Enterprises that will accomplish the most with SharePoint will have aligned business and IT teams to figure out a specific approach to this enigmatic platform — a platform that seems so easy to use but so difficult to master," CMS Watch concludes.