And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself – well … how did I get here?
Once in a Lifetime
Talking Heads (from the album, Remain in Light, October 1980)
How Did They Get There?
I have always liked the music of Talking Heads.
From the late 1970s onwards, and after years of little or no recognition, the ex-art students from the Rhode Island School of Design made famous a unique fusion of rock, groove and world beat.
This was music that people could relate to.
Likewise, I have always had a lot of time for Heads frontman, David Bryne, for his seeming humility (and obvious brilliance). Speaking of their success years later, in all modesty, he said: “A little bit of chance, a little bit of fate … which I guess is quite incredible”.
And the reason why I love the song Once in a Lifetime is not only for its haunting existential quality but because of the film Stop Making Sense.
On this footage Byrne doesn’t so much sing as speak this song.
And throughout, he performs rather like a puppet; making sudden flings of his arm, tapping his head, and raising his arms skywards in tune to the rhythm of the lyrics. It’s all quite unique, and yet his routine – physical spasms, unfocused eye movements, and sharp intakes of breath – was apparently inspired by watching footage of epilepsy sufferers.
Anyway, Lifetime was deemed so good that it was subsequently named as one of the 100 most important American songs of the 20th Century, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York now features the SMS video as one of its exhibits.
What a journey … music made art in the creators’ own lifetime!
The More Things Change …
Whenever I sit there reading this or that judgement on SharePoint, I think many people very quickly forget just how far Microsoft have come in what has been a remarkably short period of time.
The diagram below (courtesy of Sharon Richardson of Joining Dots in the States) illustrates something of the SharePoint Story up until MOSS 2007. [1]
And what follows is a personal view of that journey.
SharePoint History 1999-2006 © Joining Dots
SPS 2001
SharePoint History 1999-2006 © Joining Dots
In professional terms, I am old enough to remember the point when Microsoft announced “Tahoe” (aka SharePoint Portal Server 2001) to the world.
At the time I was working as a PM/business analyst on dynamic web-based corporate information management using metadata – think MOSS “Content Types” and you’ll get the idea – and so I was genuinely excited by the idea of Microsoft entering this field.
After all, the Microsoft solutions team at Computacenter were struggling to make this work – first on Microsoft’s Site Server 3.0 and then our own bespoke Microsoft solution (both efforts, sadly, being very forgettable).
And arguably SPS 2001 was itself equally forgettable as a release; it was basically a team-based “product” cobbled out of a loose collection of, then current, Microsoft technologies, and whose scaling performance was, quite frankly, abysmal.
I’ve no idea how many organisations adopted SPS 2001 in practice; but it must have been very small in contrast to the public interest it generated.
SPS 2003
Nevertheless, SPS 2001 got Microsoft going in this area and that – and the fact that they dominated the desktop with Office – meant that the SharePoint team’s next effort was a much more creditable departmental-level portal: SPS 2003 (including what has subsequently become known as WSS 2.0).
However, SPS 2003 still felt like flawed technology.
As a product, it was a limited platform and suffered from numerous shortcomings in the way it provided a Portal view to its users (not least in usability, web styling and content management, and the search/navigational relationship between portal and team spaces).
And what’s more, without extensive guidance issued from Microsoft, it seems as often as not to have been badly implemented within organisations.
Nevertheless, it was fairly widely adopted. And equally it did introduce the idea of SharePoint as a potentially viable Portal; thereby laying the foundations for a Microsoft take on web-based information management at an organisational level, with close integration to the Office desktop.
MOSS 2007
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 was released to market on 30 October 2006, following an estimated £120 million product development investment by Microsoft.
In both its scope and product architecture, MOSS was radically different from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (i.e. it was fundamentally much more coherent as a platform).
And it differed from previous versions of SharePoint in that it wrapped Web CMS features with (significantly enhanced) Portal features of the earlier iterations. As such, it was re-branded as an Enterprise Content Management platform capable of delivering websites, extranets and intranet portal alike.
As such, MOSS is a much broader and solid product release, wrapping up genuine website and intranet portal functionality within a single platform (built on WSS 3.0), whilst incorporating Enterprise Content Management (ECM) features such as collaboration, EDM, ERM, business intelligence, electronic forms processing, etc. to varying degrees of success.
However, while very good in places, for people working at a solution level MOSS 2007 still feels like a slightly immature product release by Microsoft.
Yet, nevertheless, from 2007 onwards it has sold extensively, and demonstrates very convincingly that information management is part of the agenda of many organisations.
Albeit, I’m sure, with varying degrees of success….
SharePoint 2010
From the perspective that I am qualified to give (i.e. as a non-developer on SharePoint), I have written previously about my personal view of the Microsoft’s recent public announcement about SharePoint 2010.
And, without wanting repeat myself too much here it seems that at least from what they have chosen to tell us the latest version of SharePoint has undergone a highly significant evolutionary shift in its features and capabilities as compared to MOSS.
And what’s more there also seem to be signs of a highly welcome shift in emphasis towards usability from the perspective of the end users. With an equal effort to make some of the relative failures in MOSS at a broad functional level – BDC, web content management, styling integration – more enterprise capable.
My hope, therefore, is that finally in SharePoint 2010 we will see a truly mature release of what is now one of the leading ECM products in the world.
And Finally …
Out there on the web it is obvious that Microsoft, in relation to SharePoint at least, still gets a fairly rough ride from many – mainly non-technical – commentators. [2]
And clearly there is some justification in this critique; it is obvious, for instance, that MOSS 2007 suffers from weaknesses and shortcomings.
But equally, to be fair to Microsoft, this is not an easy area in which to design a highly-capable Enterprise-level product overnight.
Arguably, therefore, it is only by taking a longer historical perspective that we get a more balanced view of the journey that Microsoft themselves have been on with SharePoint. And we can also start to see more clearly how the product is now potentially reaching a level of maturity in corporate terms; a situation which one could have only of dreamed of in 2001.
Such is the extent of change in SharePoint Products & Technologies in the course of a single decade of development.
… The More They Stay The Same
So what hasn’t changed?
Well, just recently, I have been re-reading The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (Harvard Business School Press, 2000).
It’s quite rare that I bother to re-read something – after all, every single day there is so much more stuff out there – but this is, quite simply, a classic of its kind.
And what’s more it’s a useful corrective to the idea that technological progress solves all; in particular, the thorny problem of corporate information management within organisations.
As one reviewer states:
In this important and finely argued volume, Brown and Duguid point out that technology occurs in a social context that is often overlooked: that things like habit, work environments, and human judgement play a major role in how, when, and even whether technology gets adopted. A refreshing and timely counter to the infoenthusiasts who think that Moore’s Law solves every problem.
In relation to corporate information management the basic premise of the book is subtle, but can be relayed as follows (and here I must apologise if, like the man standing in the cinema queue in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, I completely misrepresent the authors’ actual ideas):
- People learn primarily by doing and experiencing in settings that include other people (e.g. within social institutions such as organisations) rather than by information itself. As such, we are not merely information “consumers”, but are also an integral part of that process.
- Most useful information that is potentially transferable to others is socially situated and constructed, and is therefore very difficult to separate from its social context and package it into easily transferrable “units”.
Therefore, any attempts to standardise information for use by people is a very difficult pursuit (and impossible without considering very carefully the social context).
This argument, if you believe Brown and Duguid, has major implications for both the viability of information systems (e.g. Intranets, Portals, EDM, ERM systems, etc.) and for formal attempts to manage information in a particular organisational setting.
Now I happen to think that there is some truth in their argument.
And that as “info-enthusiasts” we remain largely oblivious to the idea that much useful information remains highly contextualised and is therefore very difficult to standardise into packages that retain a clear and unambiguous meaning for the recipient.
As such, it seems that effective information management is incredibly difficult to achieve to even a moderate degree of success – regardless of the technology used.
And that equally such attempts require a sustained intensity of effort that most implementations simply don’t even get close to.
The Information Management Landscape – What’s Changed?
“Same as it ever was, Same as it ever was….” goes the refrain in Once in a Lifetime.
Fundamentally, in the field of corporate information management at least, I essentially agree with this. In fact, it’s remarkable just how little the fundamentals in information management have altered after a decade of great change in web capabilities.
As of mid 2009, therefore, I still think that we barely scratch the surface in our understanding of how to make information management work well in the vast majority of organisational settings. [3]
And that – if we accept the essential message of Brown and Duguid – we need to recognise that information management in a corporate setting is messy, difficult and highly contextualised work, and that quite apart from the technology there are often a whole range of softer issues as to why this or that solution fails – or succeeds – in getting adopted.
As such, it is the organisational and human factors that seem matter as much, if not more, as the purely technical; and it is the former that are far more difficult to assess and account for than the latter.
But equally, working as I do as a semi-technologist from a technology perspective, I’d like to think that, when contrasted with turn of the century, there have been extraordinary changes in our technical ability to conduct information management within organisations.
Now with SharePoint 2010 on the way I am no longer quite so sure that Microsoft’s portal technology isn’t finally starting to catch up in meeting the basic technical requirements of the institutional settings in which it is placed. [4]
But nevertheless I still believe that the essential constant in the field of information management remains valid; that we still need to attend more closely to the institutional and personal settings in which such technologies are used. And that equally we must attempt to understand the problems posed by managing the life-cycle of information (in its context) far better that we actually do. [5]
And if one accepts that this is true, then isn’t it the task of the information workers and solution professionals to work that much harder on the softer aspects – the planning, management and governance tasks – of making such technological systems stick in organisations?
Thus, we shouldn’t over-focus on just one aspect of what is a highly complex domain at the expense of all the others; and claim that or that technology is flawed in this or that way. That is too easy an answer, and in any case I don’t believe that it is solely technological progress – or the lack of it – that is the fundamental reason for our relative lack of progress. [6]
It is perhaps our institutions that are resistant to change, and by extension it is our understanding of the relationship between people, processes and systems in a context that greatly needs to be improved.
So it really is a case of the more things change, the more things stay the same. Yet equally, I think it’s also possible to argue that the more we do this sort of work, the more we understand, and the more we get better.
After all, we can only get better, can’t we …?
[1] If you are at all interested in SharePoint then this person’s blog is well worth a look. See http://sharepointsharon.com.
[2] As of mid-2009, there is a very active global developer community following and supporting SharePoint; many of whom are very good at what they do. And being naturally smart people in their own right I often feel that their judgements appear, on the whole, far more balanced than their non-technical counterparts (despite what one hears otherwise).
[3] For me, much of what passed as “knowledge management” in the earlier part of this century merely confirms that view. After all, can one really manage knowledge? And personally I think that the recent rise of social networking tools represent a form of knowledge “sharing” or “facilitation”, but arguably they do nothing to “manage” knowledge as such. Of course, this is all word games, but I still think we are a long way off actively being able manage knowledge per se. And, finally, for an interesting post on this see Patrick Walsh’s recent effort. I like this guy’s stuff as he really thinks things out.
[4] Note in saying this I don’t believe for one minute that the 2010 release will be perfect. I do think, however, that we have come on a quite incredible journey with this system in what has been – in historical terms at least – a very short period of time.
[5] Equally I have had my fair share of failures in this field; and for most of them the reasons were contextually based, or, leastways, the contextual interfacing with the technology. See The SharePoint Myth for an interesting take on this in relation to SharePoint itself.
[6] And finally my apologies for the rather narrow focus of this post on SharePoint. I feel that this can equally apply to any other system, but it’s what I know about as a technology in this setting.
SharePoint: Websites, Intranets & Solution Design 