Microsoft's Tahoe project has been the cause of considerable
conjecture and rumour over the last two years. It has now emerged
as SharePoint Portal Server. Ovum's Angela Ashenden and Eric Woods
explain what the product offers and its significance for knowledge
management
The product
SharePoint Portal Server is,
unsurprisingly, designed to run on Windows operating systems, and
is optimised for the soon-to-be-released Office XP. It comprises
three key components:
1. Basic document management function
2. Advanced search and classification
3. An enterprise portal development environment
Document management
At one stage, Tahoe was being
positioned as Microsoft's document management solution. But
customers looking for a comprehensive document management
environment will be disappointed. Microsoft is making no pretence
of challenging specialist vendors such as FileNet or Documentum.
Instead, it is offering basic abilities such as version control,
check-in/check-out and document approval, all neatly integrated
into the Office XP environment.
Many organisations will welcome the level of document control
available to Office users with SharePoint. However, its document
management capabilities cannot be implemented in a distributed
environment, which will significantly limit its value to larger and
global scale organisations. In addition, although Web Store is used
as the document repository in SharePoint, there is no integration
between this and the Exchange Web Store.
Search technology
Microsoft sees the advanced search
tools included in SharePoint as one of its key differentiators. It
offers improved relevancy ranking algorithms for more accurate
searching, and includes automatic categorisation. This allows
portal designers to generate a classification model that
automatically assigns documents to the relevant headings within the
corporate taxonomy. Results sets from user queries are also
organised according to the classification system.
Another feature of SharePoint's search capabilities is its use of
"adaptive crawling" to provide intelligent indexing of resources
for the search engine. Adaptive crawling analyses the change
history of documents and uses it to judge the likelihood and
frequency of future changes. This allows SharePoint to re-index
only those documents most likely to have changed, rather than
having to index the whole document corpus every time. Microsoft
claims that this allowed it to reduce the its own intranet
re-indexing time (for more than five million documents) from 51
hours to just eight.
Portal environment
SharePoint provides a quick and easy
portal design environment, but with considerable room for
customisation.
The portal component of SharePoint is the first Microsoft product
to take full advantage of the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit. It
allows users to create one or more dashboards or views,
customisable through the use of server-based Web parts.
As well as allowing users to access other SharePoint components,
such as the document repository or the search facility, Web parts
can be created to allow access to other business systems and
applications, as well as external Web sources. In addition,
Microsoft recently announced a number of pre-built Web part
plug-ins - developed by the company and its partnerships - designed
to extend the capabilities of the dashboard and available as free
downloads. These include Web parts for CRM and ERP integration, as
well as various business and desktop application plug-ins.
The lack of integration between SharePoint and Exchange is a
disappointment. Organisations will have to do significant
integration work if they want Outlook facilities within a
SharePoint portal. This means that the current release of
SharePoint offers less of a direct challenge to Lotus's Knowledge
Discovery System than was expected.
Although its ability to function out of the box is not extensive,
Microsoft provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) allowing
organisations to customise the solution to match their
requirements. As a result, customers will need to be aware that
SharePoint's flexibility will depends on the customer having the
resources (or being prepared to buy them in) to undertake the
necessary development work.
Impact on the market
SharePoint Portal Server spans
three (relatively) distinct marketplaces. It may not do so well in
a straight comparison with specialist document management, search
or portal products on their own ground, but when the whole package
is considered, it will offer an attractive solution to
organisations for whom a base level of general ability is more
important than best-of-breed technology in one specific area.
This will be particularly important to the SME market, for whom
much knowledge management technology is too expensive and
over-specified. Microsoft's pricing strategy (£2,855 for a single
server, plus £51 per user) will appear extremely competitive
alongside the prices of Documentum, for example. However, although
SharePoint is a very attractive solution for customers with lower
headcounts (under 500 users), it is not so cost-effective for large
numbers of users.
In the content management market, large vendors such as FileNet and
Documentum are unlikely to feel much threat from SharePoint. It
will put a barrier on any attempt they might make to move down
market, but this has long been expected and so will do little to
change their market or product strategy. Smaller vendors, on the
other hand, will suffer. Organisations looking to enhance their
Windows environment with basic document management will now see
Microsoft as their first port of call.
It is a similar situation in the search and portal market. Larger
vendors such as Verity or Autonomy will not be too worried about
the arrival of SharePoint. Indeed, they may benefit from the boost
that Microsoft's entry will bring to the knowledge management
market as a whole. But smaller players targeting Microsoft
customers will find life much more difficult. In particular,
SharePoint is likely to hasten a shake-out in the overcrowded
enterprise portal market.
Conclusion
The long road to delivery has led to high
expectations of the Tahoe project. Many Microsoft customers will
welcome the final result. It will appeal to those companies that
can see the business benefits of these three knowledge management
technologies (document management, search and portal software), but
cannot afford to buy them in on a best-of-breed basis.