I have been contemplating the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010.  I think that the upcoming release to SharePoint 2010 will, for many users of SharePoint 2007, represent a fork in the road.  To my mind the questions businesses should be focusing on are less about the technological features of SharePoint and more about the activity, information and measurement of the business.  The key question is not whether you should use SharePoint 2007 or upgrade to 2010 but rather, how does your organization work, behave, and manage itself?  I would argue that it’s only when such questions are effectively answered that you can truly and realistically examine technology more effectively.

We are working with a number of clients all in sailing a similar SharePoint boat.  For example, with one of our clients  (a global manufacturing company of 300,000+ employees) their biggest challenge right now is salvaging a previous SharePoint 2007 deployment and not ending up with File Server 2.0.  The common theme is not which feature set makes the most sense, but what does my business do so that I can make sense of the feature sets.   And the irony, I can see a similar set of causes behind the same challenges for a client of approximately 300 employees (users) coming to terms with SharePoint.

And there’s nothing I’ve seen of the 2010 feature set alone that is going to do anything more than compound this situation, and make it worse for organizations.  You’ll still have users with SharePoint deployments structured in such a way that what they do and need does not sync with how SharePoint works for them.

I guess what I am saying is, you might (or might not) be surprised at the number and calibre of businesses in my experience that have failed to really make SharePoint 2007 work for them, let alone which version of SharePoint is right for them.  I do wonder how many customers are still struggling to get ROI on their 2007 deployment?  Without an understanding of ‘why’ they failed to make SharePoint more than a team-centric information dump that’s of little real improvement, it strikes me as fundamentally pointless to consider the wonderful toys on offer in 2010. 

If you are an user of SharePoint 2007 and are considering an upgrade to 2010 you might ponder the following questions:

• Do you have a true and objective understanding of the ROI and did you holdthe original business case for the 2007 investment accountable? 
• How is your SharePoint governance plan working? 
• Is your Information Architecture still relevant? 
• Are employees less overwhelmed by information (emails and files)?
• Do your employees, partners, and clients have adequate and timely access to the information they need?
• Can people within your organization connect information with the expertise that created it?
• Does your business now produce trustworthy reports at the right time, in real time?
• Does your business thrive on intuitive and capable mechanisms for moving work through the business?
• Are processes that rely on information faster and/or of higher quality?
• Is best practice re-use better?
• Is the average 'time to talent' (the time from hire to valuable employee contribution) faster?
• Has your organization made strides on building bridges across technology islands to address business-to-business information challenges?

If you've deployed SharePoint 2007 and cannot respond positively to even half of the questions above my advice would be to very carefully consider an upgrade to SharePoint 2010. I am as excited as anyone about the improved feature set expected in the next release.  But do you honestly believe that a failure to make SharePoint 2007 features really work for your business will be overcome by a new set of features in SharePoint 2010?

I have been contemplating the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010.  I think that the upcoming release to SharePoint 2010 will, for many users of SharePoint 2007, represent a fork in the road.  To my mind the questions businesses should be focusing on are less about the technological features of SharePoint and more about the activity, information and measurement of the business.  The key question is not whether you should use SharePoint 2007 or upgrade to 2010 but rather, how does your organization work, behave, and manage itself?  I would argue that it’s only when such questions are effectively answered that you can truly and realistically examine technology more effectively.

We are working with a number of clients all in sailing a similar SharePoint boat.  For example, with one of our clients  (a global manufacturing company of 300,000+ employees) their biggest challenge right now is salvaging a previous SharePoint 2007 deployment and not ending up with File Server 2.0.  The common theme is not which feature set makes the most sense, but what does my business do so that I can make sense of the feature sets.   And the irony, I can see a similar set of causes behind the same challenges for a client of approximately 300 employees (users) coming to terms with SharePoint.

And there’s nothing I’ve seen of the 2010 feature set alone that is going to do anything more than compound this situation, and make it worse for organizations.  You’ll still have users with SharePoint deployments structured in such a way that what they do and need does not sync with how SharePoint works for them.

I guess what I am saying is, you might (or might not) be surprised at the number and calibre of businesses in my experience that have failed to really make SharePoint 2007 work for them, let alone which version of SharePoint is right for them.  I do wonder how many customers are still struggling to get ROI on their 2007 deployment?  Without an understanding of ‘why’ they failed to make SharePoint more than a team-centric information dump that’s of little real improvement, it strikes me as fundamentally pointless to consider the wonderful toys on offer in 2010. 

If you are an user of SharePoint 2007 and are considering an upgrade to 2010 you might ponder the following questions:

• Do you have a true and objective understanding of the ROI and did you holdthe original business case for the 2007 investment accountable? 
• How is your SharePoint governance plan working? 
• Is your Information Architecture still relevant? 
• Are employees less overwhelmed by information (emails and files)?
• Do your employees, partners, and clients have adequate and timely access to the information they need?
• Can people within your organization connect information with the expertise that created it?
• Does your business now produce trustworthy reports at the right time, in real time?
• Does your business thrive on intuitive and capable mechanisms for moving work through the business?
• Are processes that rely on information faster and/or of higher quality?
• Is best practice re-use better?
• Is the average 'time to talent' (the time from hire to valuable employee contribution) faster?
• Has your organization made strides on building bridges across technology islands to address business-to-business information challenges?

If you've deployed SharePoint 2007 and cannot respond positively to even half of the questions above my advice would be to very carefully consider an upgrade to SharePoint 2010. I am as excited as anyone about the improved feature set expected in the next release.  But do you honestly believe that a failure to make SharePoint 2007 features really work for your business will be overcome by a new set of features in SharePoint 2010?