Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 - Pretty Pictures or Good Results?

I have been reading much of the hype about Sharepoint 2010 and have yet to use it myself.  But I found the image gallery at Information Week enlightening -- and disappointing.  To me, it looks like a combination of all the pretty editing functions of Powerpoint, Excel, Visio, Project, and so on, all bundled into a so-called collaboration tool.

It strikes me the emphasis is on making the results look pretty, rather than getting to the best solutions.  In other words form over substance.  I have ranted many times about the abuse of Powerpoint, where the presenter puts more effort into the graphics and animation, at the expense of a compelling story line.  My fear is that Microsoft is turning Sharepoint into a tool to do the same thing for collaboration.

In my experience, effective collaboration projects need to focus on the fundamentals, as described in the 4Ps of Effective Collaboration post.  Success often comes down to defining the task well (purpose), getting the right team members and leaders (people), and following an effective and open problem-solving path (process).  Sometimes the tool can get in the way, especially if it is difficult to use or access by all the team members.  If there is a long learning curve for the tool or the tool starts driving the process, then it can overwhelm the basics of effective collaboration.

There are some pretty pictures in this slide gallery.  Some of them might represent great ways of selling the team's solution to others in the enterprise.  But most of them require a great deal of thought to put together, and the choices about what to portray or draw might adversely affect the problem-solving process.  Think about a time when your team was addressing problems or opportunities with a particular product, and someone asked what is the profit margin for the product; the accounting method used to answer that question can have a dramatic impact on how the team thinks about the product and the solutions they propose.

I am unlikely to reach out to Sharepoint for my next collaboration exercises.  I am fearful of the number of collaboration teams who will be forced to use it because of the selection by an enterprise CIO or the bias of a team leader.

Update on 25 December 2010 by Lokesh Datta

See Related Posts:

• A Taxonomy of Collaboration Tools
• Open Letter to Collaboration Tool Providers
• Long Shadows of Collaboration Tools
• Keep it simple on the collaboration tools
• Security Imperative for Collaborative Cloud Computing

Comments

[Hermann Loeh]

Steve, I find this a very interesting observation. SharePoint 2010 seems to have become better in two respects: it looks nicer, and the integration and management of data has become much easier.
But the usefullness as a collaboration tool has improved very little. Mainly because collaboration is not about data, but about the 4 P's you mention. I really like the book of Michael Sampson "Seamless Teamwork", in which he shows how a good team goes through the project life-cycle and how to use SharePoint to support this. Yes, in the hands of an experienced craftsman, even not so good tools can be used to build something nice...
As a result, I have not met many companies that use SharePoint for driving "real" collaboration, but that use basically as a file and other data repository.