SharePoint Is a Waste of Money, But It Shouldn't Be

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 is an amazing tool. Imagine a project management site, library, supply chain system, and records center coupled with Web 2.0 and social networking. It can't miss, right? Right! The promise of SharePoint has made it a wildly popular implementation in business and government. The practicality of it, however, has made it a hair-pulling experience for many people who are just trying to get some work done. Where's the disconnect?

The biggest challenge seems to be implementation. Typically, SharePoint gets poor treatment by IT people, who view it as a glorified web server or network share. Either way, it's an unknown and therefore a pain. Often, IT folks will spend six months planning the hardware and bandwidth and six hours on the software. Once SharePoint is turned on, the team walks away. It's tough for most employees to create a website from scratch; it's almost impossible for a novice to use SharePoint to its potential. The hardware, licensing, and IT effort are all for naught.

The answer is pretty simple: IT need to listen to the user base. They should find out -- from workers, not their manager -- about their daily work. Engineers can discover with them what features SharePoint can offer that save them some effort. Programmers can go over the use of RSS feeds and alerts for automatic communication. Trainers can school them in the benefits and surface usage. Once they get their feet wet, users will come back to IT for time-saving features that will really demonstrate SharePoint's ROI. Otherwise, SharePoint is just another spike in the five-year budget.