Comments on: Microsoft’s SharePoint is a Virus Infecting BPM

By: SharePoint and BPM White Paper Research « BPM Focus

SharePoint and BPM White Paper Research « BPM Focus — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:01:21 +0000

[...] I will be exploring the issues associated therewith, the different sorts of integrations, the future of BPM linked with this MS “Swiss Army Knife” (as Rashid Kahn described it on Jim Sinur’s post). [...]

By: It’s Clear: Microsoft’s SharePoint Starts Many Process Efforts

It’s Clear: Microsoft’s SharePoint Starts Many Process Efforts — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:48:41 +0000

[...] http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2008/11/11/microsofts-sharepoint-is-a-virus-infecting-bpm/ [...]

By: Garth Knudson

Garth Knudson — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:48:15 +0000

Jim, thank you for addressing this topic. From the vendor side, I find many organizations – government and commercial – investigating SharePoint’s workflow capabilities. To them SharePoint comes “free” with their enterprise license. Now they’re asking themselves how to get the most out of their free software in their really significant Microsoft investments. Since the majority are still new to BPM and don’t really know enough about workflow in general, they cannot easily and quickly differentiate between what SharePoint offers in contrast to a much more robust BPM product. They don’t understand that SharePoint is a technical tool meant for very technical people. It is not geared toward both business analysts and developers. Furthermore, they don’t see that using SharePoint workflow really requires a whole slew of other Mircrosoft products as well as signifcant investments in people, methodology and training. They don’t get that where SharePoint is the great democratizer of content, BPM is the great optimizer of forms and forms-based process automation. Where SharePoint is developer-centric, BPM is a business user friendly and proven in hundreds of ways to deliver content-enabled applications. Regarding SharePoint, Gartner has a lot of educating to do. BPM presents a better and more ROI-proven platform for deploying process-driven applications.

By: Rashid Khan

Rashid Khan — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:57:10 +0000

Does anyone remember the early days of Lotus Notes? Lotus coined the word “groupware” and was the pioneer in workflow. Lotus Notes went down the “viral” path of being the Swiss Army knife for doing everythig for everybody. Along the way it became large and cumbersome, the antithesis of agility. Today, no one talks about Lotus Notes as being a serious contender in the BPM space. OK, maybe Microsoft will execute much better than IBM. But at the end of the day, I believe that SharePoint will suffer the same fate as Lotus Notes for the same reason: BPM is too big to be rendered in to one facet of a Swiss Army Knife

By: Jeffrey Mann

Jeffrey Mann — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 11:46:47 +0000

This really is one one of the main issues I come across in talking customers about SharePoint: it can be so many things to different people. Depending on how you use it, SharePoint is a collaboration platform, a portal, a document repository, a search engine, an ECM platform, an intranet, an extranet, a web content management platform, a workflow tool, a development platform or a bottle opener (OK, not really that last one).
Initially, this is one of SP’s strengths, but it often ends up being a weakness. The answer seems to be SharePoint, no matter what the question is. The product’s widespread adoption means that more and more people will have to figure out where the limits and overlaps are.