Larry Cannell
Research Director
2 years at Gartner
25 years IT industry
Larry Cannell is a research director for Gartner Research, in Gartner's Burton IT1 Collaboration and Content Strategies service. Mr. Cannell covers search, content management, collaborative workspaces, as well as open-source collaboration and content solutions. Read Full Bio
by Larry Cannell | February 1, 2011 | Comments Off
Distributed commenting systems for blogs and websites have been around for a few years but have not seen a huge uptake (relative to other popular services). With the potential of a distributed Facebook-based commenting system, there is speculation in the blogosphere over the future of distributed commenting pioneers such as DISQUS, livefyre, Echo, or IntenseDebate. Facebook’s entrance could build mainstream awareness of this type of capability and, in the short term, these early innovators will probably benefit from Facebook’s offering.
However, the longer term impact of Facebook Comments may be part of a slow chipping away at the dominance of blogging platforms provided by Google (Blogger) and Automattic (WordPress.com or self-hosted blogs running the open source WordPress.org blogging platform). Millions of blogs will now have the potential to send traffic to Facebook.
Facebook will be able to power the entire commenting system–handling the log-in and publishing, cross-promoting comments on individuals’ Facebook walls
Facebook’s next big media move: Comments | The Social – CNET News
Category: Uncategorized Tags: facebook, google, wordpress
by Larry Cannell | January 28, 2011 | 1 Comment
There has been lots of discussion in the blogosphere this week over the release of Tibbr, a new enterprise social network offering from Tibco. Many in the Enterprise 2.0 crowd are saying that Tibbr is the solution we have been waiting for and shows how social networks can be applied to the enterprise. While I agree in principle, most of these assessments of Tibbr have missed some key points.
For background, Tibbr provides a social network that also surfaces events coming from enterprise applications. Think Facebook, but instead of receiving messages from Farmville you see activities going on in enterprise applications. This is similar to Salesforce’s Chatter, where CRM-based events (e.g., a sale is closed or a customer requested a meeting) are surfaced in the social network’s activity stream. Tibbr extends this by surfacing events coming from multiple applications within an activity stream (not just CRM). Imagine a product development organization using a social network that includes events from their production release or warranty systems. A particular engineer’s activity stream might see events like "part xyz has been assigned a supplier" or "product abc has received an excessive number of complaints."
However, just focusing on the social networking aspect of Tibbr misses an important point. Tibbr has the opportunity to replace work already being done and not just be another well-intended collaborative environment that adds to already high workloads. If it hits its mark, Tibbr could be a product that sells itself to an enterprise worker (like an engineer) because they see it benefitting them personally, not just because they are told to collaborate.
For example, most product development engineers need to maintain an awareness of what is happening within their scope of responsibility. They may be tracking the status of several programs, while monitoring the release of products in various stages, and participating in a multitude of other activities in order to take action at the appropriate time. Life for the engineer (as with most knowledge workers) is a constant juggling act.
Unfortunately, most knowledge workers must use multiple applications to keep track of everything going on (to keep all of the balls in the air). These applications have been around a long time, have a narrow view of the world and, as a result, impose a significant amount of overhead on our engineer. Automated notifications (e.g. where an application sends e-mail when something significant happens) can be helpful but these easily get lost in the noise of a busy inbox. Surfacing application events within a social network could ease this overhead by putting them within the context of an environment an engineer uses everyday.
Tibbr won’t succeed because it is an easy-to-use social network (although, ease of use is critical and the social aspects of it will be valuable). It will succeed only if it takes work off the table for knowledge workers by bringing them the information they were going to have to retrieve anyway and it brings it to them in a familiar (Facebook) style.
Stowe Boyd is correct when he says "Social = Me First." From an enterprise perspective "me first" means giving me the information I need to do my job. One thing that separates enterprise from consumer social environments is that much of the information I need is locked in an application that was written twenty years ago.
In addition, architects should view Tibbr as a demonstration of what is necessary and possible within an enterprise social environment and not just focus on the Facebook-like interface it provides. Tibco’s application integration capabilities are part of the secret sauce behind Tibbr. Enablement of these types of environments require back-end application connectivity, which often needs some pretty heavy lifting to put in place. This is where an IT organization can make a huge difference. IT knows the data sources, manages the applications that generate it, and owns the architecture for distributing the data.
Lastly, these application connections should not just be available within a monolithic solution, like Tibbr. Rather, syndication of application events needs to come through standard protocols and formats (e.g., Activity Streams) to enable their reuse by the next breakthrough social software that the blogosphere falls in love with.
Category: Uncategorized Tags: activity streams, social networks, tibbr
by Larry Cannell | November 24, 2010 | 1 Comment
Two weeks ago Cisco hosted a Collaboration Summit for analysts, consultants, and partners in Phoenix, Arizona. Conference attendees were treated to great weather and fantastic food. Unfortunately, the conference was thin on content and light on vision. At the start of Padmasree Warrior’s keynote I was optimistic when she described Cisco “new workspace” vision involving:
- Social
- Mobile
- Virtual
- Video
The focus on “work” is of primary interest to me and has long been a perspective from which I approach social software and collaborative technologies. Warrior also said their collaboration vision involved tapping into popular consumer trends around social networks and mobile devices. However, what followed the next two days was disappointing from a vision perspective and seemed more of a confusing rationalization of a disjoint product portfolio; one based on an aspirational view of the world in which video plays a big part and where desktop virtualization saves the day for IT.
To be honest, I was mostly interested in hearing about Quad, Cisco’s entry into the enterprise social software market. Yet, there were no sessions discussing the product. However, on a positive note we heard of Cisco’s plan to launch Quad this week on their intranet for tens of thousands of their employees. Perhaps this exposure of social software within Cisco will enable it to gain a more prominent role in their collaboration strategy going forward. For now, it seems Cisco equates collaboration with video.
The two main talking points that Cisco presenters focused on last week were video and virtualization. A presentation didn’t seem complete until either or both topics were somehow injected into the story. For example, during the last presentation on Wednesday morning (the only full day of the conference) we learned how Cisco solved the problem of delivering video to a virtualized desktop environment. While this interested the technologist in me, it seemed like an odd choice for such a prime spot on an agenda at a collaboration summit (especially since there were no presentations dedicated to Quad).
In another example, on Thursday we were introduced to Cisco’s Social Miner. This a a product that watches social media streams for topics of interest and enables enterprises to detect and respond to tweets or blog posts. The session started out very well and identified multiple levels of social media engagement maturity. I would have liked to have gone deeper into each of these levels and how Social Miner addresses them. The topic quickly (far too soon in my opinion) shifted over to Cisco’s other customer contact products, which integrate with Social Miner. However, perhaps the strangest segue of the conference came during a demonstration of Social Miner when the speaker asked “How does video fit in to this?”
Cisco’s view is that video (and not just any video, “pervasive video” were the words often used) is an essential element of collaboration. I couldn’t disagree more. This is a message PictureTel was pitching thirteen years ago. While the picture quality is better and telepresence is able to capture a more nuanced meeting experience, the fact is most people do not like having a camera in front of them during a meeting (or any other time for that matter). Certainly video is taking up an increasing share of Internet bandwidth, but this is through the consumption of video, not the production of ad-hoc, collaborative video streams.
During a demonstration of how Cisco’s products could bring together four workers within an ad-hoc video-based meeting, the sharing of a fictional design drawing quickly became the primary focus, relegating all of the talking heads to a small part of the screen. To me, this demonstration was a metaphor for the relative importance of video within an online meeting. Audio is essential, screen sharing is valuable, but video is of secondary importance. Of course, there are many niche applications where video is critical (a customer story at the summit involving the use of video on drilling platforms was compelling). However, this hardly approaches the level of pervasive.
It’s not that enterprises do not have a need for creating video. I believe most probably do and, in my opinion, Cisco could make video creation a core part of an information worker’s toolkit. However, it wouldn’t be through pointing a camera at someone. Rather, it would be through screen recordings that capture presentations, demonstrations, or otherwise making it possible to provide rich, visually-appealing, data-focused videos (often called screencasts) and then make it easy to share these recordings with their colleagues. After all, video should be about visual communication, not just talking heads.
Category: Uncategorized Tags: cisco, collaboration, screencasts, video
by Larry Cannell | November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
On Monday, Facebook announced a number of enhancements that will be coming to the popular social network’s messaging utility. Facebook Messages is a simple private messaging utility (similar to e-mail) that manages an ad-hoc conversation thread — where the formality of a Facebook group is not available but exposure on a social stream is not appropriate. Messages are organized into four buckets: Messages (an inbox), Updates, Sent and a new one called “Other.”
Notes
- These enhancements provide the ability to contribute to Facebook message threads using SMS, chat, or e-mail. SMS contributions will use existing Facebook SMS mechanisms. "Chat" means Facebook Chat.
- E-mail can be contributed to a message thread (as in a reply) or addressed to a specific user via an @facebook.com address.
- Facebook will determine the (Facebook) identity of the sender of an incoming e-mail message. This identity is used to filter the message.
- Messages are filtered based on Facebook privacy settings. A user can allow messages from friends only, friends of friends, or everyone (all e-mail goes through).
- E-mail messages sent to an @facebook.com address that do not make it through these filters (listed above) could show up in a new bucket: Other. Messages may also be bounced back to the sender. Specific privacy settings determine what happens to these messages (see this FAQ page for details).
- Facebook users can remove themselves from a message thread to stop receiving updates.
- Files can be attached to e-mail sent to @facebook.com addresses.
- Users can provide a traditional e-mail address to receive messages in the form of first.last@facebook.com.
- Facebook’s search will now operate across streams, friends, and messages.
Initial Thoughts
- Facebook Messages does not replace e-mail systems as we know them today. This update is about improving the service’s existing messaging capabilities and unifying the experience across multiple messaging options.
- This is aimed at users who primarily (or only) use Facebook, which could be an enormous number of people. However, there are features in Facebook Messages that power e-mail users will wish they had, such as removing themselves from an e-mail thread.
- This provides Facebook the ability to support messaging scenarios where e-mail is allowed but applications cannot be installed (e.g., locked-down PCs).
- With Facebook now serving 500M users and counting, a successful Facebook Messages utility could result in a new popular online messaging metaphor.
- This qualifies as a unified communication and collaboration experience in the sense that it unifies multiple methods of participating in Facebook. For many Facebook users, this may be all the unification they need.
- Google Buzz is an attempt to extend e-mail into a social network. Facebook, on the other hand, is extending its social network into e-mail (in a Facebook-centric way).
- Surprisingly, this type of unified experience is similar to what large enterprise vendors, such as Microsoft and IBM, have been marketing for years.
- If successful, Facebook Messages could influence the future of integrated enterprise communication and collaboration. However, how much (if any) influence this will have on enterprise solutions remains to be seen.
Links
Category: Uncategorized Tags: facebook, messaging, social networks
by Larry Cannell | November 3, 2010 | 2 Comments
Earlier this week Dries Buytaert, Acquia’s CTO and the founder of the Drupal project (a popular open source web content solution), announced that Acquia has received an additional round of funding. In the announcement Buytaert also outlined their successes from this past year.
We are announcing that Acquia closed $8.5 million in Series C funding. Combined with our Series A funding and our Series B funding, this brings our total funding to $23.5 million USD.
In the last year, our business grew by more than 300% and we went from 30 to 70 full-time employees. Drupal Gardens grew from 0 to 25,000 sites, we added 100 enterprise customers to Acquia Hosting, and our support business has in excess of 550 customers.
Source: Acquia raises $8.5 million series C | Acquia
In addition, Acquia recently announced plans to open offices in Europe. It appears Acquia has proven itself to their investors and are ready to build on their initial successes. Here are some investments Acquia could make with this latest round of funding:
- Drupal for the enterprise: Growing their presence in the enterprise market was the number one opportunity cited by Buytaert in his announcement. Drupal’s low-cost entry point, flexible architecture, and ability to support a variety of application scenarios provide a good foundation upon which to build Acquia’s enterprise business.
- Drupal as social software: In April Acquia released Drupal Commons, a prepackaged distribution consisting of Drupal’s core software and other add-ons configured to deliver a social networking site. It was a relatively low-cost investment for Acquia since the product is mostly based on popular community modules. Acquia could invest more in these types of capabilities, including additional hosting options. When first announcing Drupal Commons, Buytaert clearly positioned Jive as a target (see Drupal Commons, meet Jive Software).
- Separate platform from application: Many Drupalers think of the product as a framework first and an application second. However, it is difficult to get the attention of enterprise business managers with a technology framework; they are interested in the application. Being able to deliver both is difficult since there is a natural tension that exists between the two. Drupal’s core software needs to support thousands of scenarios while specific deployments strive to meet a business need. Strengthening the separation between platform and application would enable Drupal to continue growing in multiple directions (e.g., social software, WCM, intranets, etc.). Buytaert identified these two directions when laying out plans for development Drupal 8 (the next major release).
However, Acquia still faces many challenges going forward:
- Growth will increase community tensions: The Drupal community appears to have remained strong throughout Acquia’s successful entrance into the market. Credit Buytaert’s leadership for this. However, going forward this will not get any easier. Governance of volunteer-driven open source projects is still in its infancy and requires a different type of leadership than that of a project that was originally backed by a commercial entity and then later courted a community. The Drupal community came first and Acquia’s fate remains tied to its success.
- Competition within the enterprise remains fierce: With their release of Drupal Commons, Acquia clearly took aim at Jive. However, there are many more competitors to deal with, such as other enterprise social software and established content management vendors. The platform/application combination of SharePoint and NewsGator will be an interesting dynamic to watch, particularly given the direction Drupal seems to be heading.
- Open source on the Internet is really about the money: Although open source solutions are flexible and are able to keep up with the latest trends, cost is the real reason driving many enterprises go with open source web content solutions. However, many of these needs can now also be met by low-cost services such as Squarespace and Tumblr. Even WordPress’ recent major release adds lightweight WCM capabilities.Open source projects are formed to fill a need. Many commercial vendors have learned their lessons and now work hard to avoid creating conditions that would cause a competitive open source project to emerge.
Although Acquia is still a small company, the Drupal community and the number of installations on the Internet is large.Given the low-cost of the product, the strong community appeal, and a growing commercial company (Acquia) offering support and other services, Drupal could be a competitive and disruptive product for some time to come.
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Larry Cannell | October 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Microsoft will be adding multiple levels of enterprise packages to their BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services) SaaS offering and is also renaming the service to “Office 365.” All of these packages will be based on the latest releases of SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync (formerly called Office Communications Server).
Microsoft Corp. today announced Microsoft Office 365, the company’s next generation in cloud productivity that brings together Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online in an always-up-to-date cloud service.
Source: Microsoft Announcement
However, as the name implies, Office 365 goes beyond the current BPOS offerings and adds support for the Microsoft Office productivity suite. For many enterprise strategists, this is the most significant aspect of today’s news. Prior to this announcement, the Office 2010 web apps could only be served through either the free Windows Live service (and were not licensed for commercial use) or within intranets by installing and serving them from a SharePoint Foundation server. With Office 365 the web apps will be available in a package targeted at SMBs and as part of upgraded enterprise (BPOS) offerings.
The current version of BPOS will be equivalent to the entry-level Office 365 enterprise package. Three additional higher-priced packages are also expected to be introduced. All of these new packages will include the Office web apps. The two most expensive packages also include a subscription service for desktop-installed Office apps (the high-end version of the suite called Office Professional Plus). The Office 2010 desktop apps will be automatically kept up to date through Windows Update.
My initial reaction:
- Even if an enterprise wants to outsource SharePoint services to Microsoft, there are still good reasons to keep some SharePoint servers onsite, such as hosting the Office 2010 web apps. The entry level enterprise offering (equivalent to current BPOS) will not serve the Office 2010 web apps. At this time, the next higher priced Office 365 package will minimally be required and costs $6 more per user per month. Paying such a premium for the Office web apps may be tough to justify.
- While this is a big change in how Office is delivered, Microsoft is still hedging its bets when it comes to the desktop-installed apps. Note that only the most expensive Office suite is available via subscription. Perhaps Microsoft thinks a monthly payment may induce people to go with the higher-end package or they are unsure if the concept will catch on and are trying to simplify it by providing an all-in-one package.
- I would not expect larger enterprises to use the Office Pro Plus subscription service for more than a few desktops for two reasons. First, the expense. The cheapest Office 365 package that includes the client-apps subscription is expected to be $24/user/month. Second, accountability. IT will still be responsible for what happens to the desktop environment and many will want to continue validating major pieces of software before deployment. After all, if there is a problem then IT is the organization that answers to the business when something doesn’t work and makes the trip to the desk to fix it. Reliability may eventually prove to not be a problem. However, imagine if a major release of Office showed up overnight on everyone’s desk (think of the major changes in UI that came with Office 2007, for example).
Category: Cloud Tags: exchange, lync, microsoft, office, saas, sharepoint
by Larry Cannell | October 12, 2010 | 3 Comments
The blogosphere is worked-up again, this time over recent changes to Facebook Groups. Although I am skeptical, Facebook Groups is worth watching because the opportunities it could enable are huge. Here’s why.
Many enterprises have been struggling to use their intranets for more than just pathways to applications or conduits for downloading documents (an intranet-as-plumbing approach). One of the biggest barriers to enabling a collaborative intranet has been the lack of a widely recognized online group interaction metaphor. In other words, many people do not see intranet-based group collaboration as something that is worth their time to learn. A big contributor to this attitude is that each product delivers a different online experience (SharePoint vs. Notes vs. eRoom, etc.). E-mail is popular because everyone knows how to use it (and most use it in their personal life). Even when e-mail first emerged, most people were able to figure it out because it is based on a familiar interaction pattern (a letter sent within an envelope).
Established group collaboration patterns are based on physical presence (like a meeting) and getting people to think beyond these patterns has been difficult. Groupware, workspaces, wikis, and even instant messaging have long been able to provide decent online group collaboration. There are no technical reasons why these products aren’t more commonly used on intranets. In other words, many IT curmudgeons will tell you there is nothing new in Facebook Groups (and they are right, up to a point).
For me, the biggest reason Facebook is exciting (from an enterprise perspective) is because it is establishing a new widely recognizable online interaction pattern (consisting of streams of status messages and activity notifications). Enterprise collaboration products that have been providing group-focused workspaces for many years are being refitted to tap into the broad familiarity of Facebook. If they can provide something that behaves like Facebook then people will be more comfortable using it and will more easily recognize its benefits. The rebranding of enterprise wikis as enterprise social software is just one example of where this is happening. If Facebook Groups succeeds then expect enterprise products to soon follow by providing similar experiences.
Personally, I would love to see Facebook Groups succeed. Not for the sake of Facebook, but for the sake of enterprises trying to use their intranets for something like Facebook.
Category: Uncategorized Tags: collaboration, facebook, social software
by Larry Cannell | September 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Congratulations to Automattic (the company behind WordPress). Microsoft chose not to compete with WordPress to win an unwinnable war for Internet blog platform supremacy. Instead, Microsoft gave in and it looks like they are trying to leverage WordPress’ popularity to improve the visibility of other Windows Live properties.
It is interesting to note that WordPress.com is based on the same code developed by the popular open source project (called WordPress.org). Estimates from BuiltWith show that WordPress.com’s biggest competitor is self-hosted WordPress.org blogs and together they are clearly a dominant blogging platform. The Microsoft blog post referenced below says WordPress powers 8.5% of all sites on the Internet, not just blogs. In an ironic twist, this can be thought of as an indirect way for Microsoft to use open source to compete against other Internet service providers (the enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if it is based on open source).
Windows Live and WordPress.com have worked together to build a simple way to move your blog posts, comments, and integrated photos right over to WordPress.com and start taking advantage of all their new features. And we’ll also redirect all your old Spaces URLs to your new blog, so you don’t lose any visitors along the way.
WordPress.com and Windows Live partnering together and providing an upgrade for 30 million Windows Live Spaces customers
Category: Cloud Tags: blogs, microsoft, open source, wordpress
by Larry Cannell | September 23, 2010 | 1 Comment
In a previous post I noted that SharePoint and Office 2010 are more integrated than ever before. However, this integrated experience is not extended to Windows. But this begs the question: how could Windows integrate better with SharePoint?
Windows 7′s federated search is a good example of how I would like to see any future SharePoint/Windows integration take shape. Today, people searching their Windows 7 desktop computer can quickly switch to searching a SharePoint 2010 site, without having to stop what they are doing, start a browser, and then issuing another search.
WebDAV Today, CMIS Tomorrow?
Windows Explorer is capable of navigating SharePoint-based folders and documents today using the WebDAV protocol. However, setting up WebDAV within Windows is not simple. In addition, SharePoint 2010 provides better APIs than WebDAV and richer navigational methods than a simple hierarchy of folders containing documents. Ideally, an updated Windows interface like this should be based on the recently approved Content Management Interoperability Standard (CMIS), support for which is in SharePoint 2010.
Compliance with CMIS mandates a content system provides a fairly minimal set of capabilities, primarily support for navigating folders and opening documents. However, the optional features in CMIS could provide the basis for a significantly richer exploration of repository-based content by using metadata. For example, instead of being limited to a simple folder hierarchy, imagine content being explored by type of file, by date, or by custom fields that are meaningful to the business such as sales account, plant code, or engineering release. Content wouldn’t just be stored in one directory but could be found via multiple paths using this metadata. For example, a design specification might be found by exploring multiple paths such as product segments, regions, or suppliers. Content management vendors have been demonstrating these opportunities in CMIS for months and there are even desktop products that can do this now (checkout OpenWorkdesk).
Baking CMIS capabilities into Windows could be quite disruptive to the content management market. It would position Windows as the de-facto leading CMIS client and provide Microsoft opportunities to tout SharePoint as a back-end content repository. From an IT Professional’s perspective this would enable easier browsing of documents, possibly across all of an enterprise’s content repositories. If Microsoft took a platform approach they could also provide a CMIS API that applications could use, enabling integration of CMIS-based content within desktop applications.
Isn’t it time that Microsoft moved beyond WebDAV and supported CMIS in Windows?
Category: Windows 7 Tags: cmis, sharepoint, Windows 7
by Larry Cannell | September 23, 2010 | Comments Off
We’ve previously discussed how SharePoint and Office 2010 can integrate on many levels. However, while this may benefit Office users it does little to address the needs of a broader audience Microsoft serves: Windows users.
For review, Office/SharePoint 2010 work together like no previous Office/SharePoint releases:
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Office has become a content management front-end for SharePoint. Users can checkout/in, view version history, apply centrally-managed metadata, and select from a common set of document templates.
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SharePoint enables new Office features by being the real-time hub for synchronous co-authoring sessions (e.g., multiple people working on a spreadsheet simultaneous) and also serves the Office web applications within intranets.
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SharePoint finally has an offline content strategy with Office SharePoint Workspace.
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Office now treats SharePoint as a first-class source by making it easy to find SP-based documents (via a favorites list that can be managed on SharePoint) and faster to open/save SP-based documents (using caching).
In other words, Microsoft positioned SharePoint 2010 to enable collaboration and information management features in Office, and positioned Office 2010 to be a rich client front-end for SharePoint. In contrast, desktop Windows gets virtually no love from SharePoint.
WebDAV is Slow, OpenSearch is a Better Example
For some time time now the answer to Windows/SharePoint integration has supposedly been WebDAV. SharePoint supports a WebDAV-compliant interface that enables Windows to provide an explorer-based navigation of document libraries. When it works, it is quite cool. However, setting this up in Windows is not trivial. In addition, with the new APIs in SharePoint 2010, WebDAV is yesterday’s news (actually, it was news in 1999, which was when the first RFC for WebDAV was published).
The biggest problem with WebDAV is the overhead it imposes. WebDAV is a file-oriented protocol (a slightly better version of FTP). Office applications have been able to open and save documents via WebDAV for years. However, even if you change just a single letter in a PowerPoint slide deck, for example, the entire presentation must be transmitted to SharePoint every time you save it (for a large file this could be several minutes). The caching Office/SharePoint 2010 now employs enables most documents to be saved to a library almost as fast as the C: drive (once cached).
Windows 7’s federated search, in cooperation with SharePoint 2010 support of OpenSearch, illustrates the type of capability Microsoft needs to build into Windows to simplify the overall Windows/SharePoint experience. Window 7 can provide search results from SharePoint alongside desktop search results.
Moving Files Between Windows and SharePoint is Too Difficult
Let’s step back for a moment and talk about simply moving documents between Windows and SharePoint. Perhaps the most frustrating experience that has to be dealt with is the different file naming schemes. Some characters that are valid in a Windows file name are not valid in names of files stored in SharePoint. This can become a real pain, particularly if you have to move a large number of files (perhaps a team wants to start using SharePoint in place of file shares and is moving their documents). At times it seems like Windows and SharePoint are products sold by separate companies.
When we’re talking about a future where local computing and cloud computing experiences are becoming blended together (Microsoft’s vision of this is called Software + Services) Microsoft needs to fix inconsistencies, such as different file naming schemes, that prevent Windows from taking part in an integrated experience with SharePoint.
In addition, future versions of Windows should interoperate with SharePoint as much as Office can now interoperate with SharePoint. I’ll discuss an idea for doing this in my next post.
Category: Windows 7 Tags: office, sharepoint, windows