As you all already know, Microsoft released SharePoint 2010 and thereby really entered the mainstream of ECM. There are already enough blogs and whitepapers that cover the new and improved features of this version. So, I’m not going to go in to those aspects.

No, What really caught my eye was the AIIM industry watch SharePoint – Strategies and Experiences.

An interesting and thorough piece of work. Interesting because, it states that the number of SharePoint implementations is soaring, and deployments are going round and about. “A high degree of Market penetration”, as Gartner states it.

Yet, the true benefits of these implementations, aren’t always realised.

What interested me was the fact that SharePoint remains predominantly an IT implementation. Information Management or the Business aren’t really consulted, nor do they have a real say in the fit for purpose-ness. This gave me a flashback to the old (or quite often still current) days, where file share was the way to go. In the file share paradigm, IT was Information Management and governance was “access or not”. File shares blossomed and, thus, grew out of proportion. Within that paradigm the main “items” used: folders and documents. Result after years of use: a spaghetti of information structures (or chaos, as one might say) existed.

Now lets take that mind-set of items and structures and shift to the SharePoint paradigm.

SharePoint is an impressive and utterly flexible platform. If you want it, you can have it. The pitfall of flexibility is being over-flexible. On the file share the same problem existed, but there you had only two types of items to “worry” about. In SharePoint, that’s a hole different ballgame. Yes, you have the folders and the documents, but you also have sites, site collections, libraries, lists, calendars, discussion boards, content types, wiki’s, charts, collumns, metadata (managed or not), webparts, lay-out, et cetera, et cetera.

What you have, is an utterly flexible system. What you have, is the risk of “uber spaghetti”, “File shares to the exponent”.

A very important part of SharePoint is Governance; Microsoft states this quite distinctly. And that’s exactly where the statement ends. On Technet there are spread sheets and tools abundant to (start to) implement the system. But a coherent approach lacks. Thus, on the one hand you have the business, on the other “the tool”.

THE most important thing you have to do, to be able to successfully implement SharePoint, is to first align the Business Needs with IT. Translating the way the Business does its work (or wants to do its work; there’s a subtle, but ever so important and difficult to manage difference), to the platform and its mode d’emploi.

If you skip this step (what quite often is the case), you’re wandering into the realm of chaos. Not today, not tomorrow, but soon. The bottom line: one cannot skip this step. Is it hard? Yes. Does it take time? Yes. Do you see the results instantly? No. Can you quantify it in advance? No (if you can, you didn’t skip the step).

SharePoint is like a wild bronco, and a powerful specimen for that matter. But a horse is only useful to us humans, if it’s tamed and does our bidding (of course, bidding in the form of a respectful partnership).

As you tame your horse, you also have to tame SharePoint.

Our approach? First, do the deep dive in to Business, identify its ambition and recognize its strategy. From that, go in to its processes, talk to enough employees, ask feedback, do workshops, encounter enough business units. Then, create overview and form the overall strategic work concept, translate this to the product that needs to be realised. Thereby, don’t go totally awol. Stay in tune with the IT system, its do’s and don’ts, but don’t get drawn into the functionality (yet). Then do the implementation; so that system follows business, and not the other way round.

This approach is a form of walking a tightrope. It takes a lot of experience in the field and substantial knowledge of Business Processes, People behaviour, Information Management and IT systems. It requires being the ultimate intermediary.

Mind you, if you take up the glove, and are willing to walk the distance, afterwards you’ll be glad you did.

My advise: Don’t just buy the horse, but tame the beast.

In this post I will compare five free apps for the Iphone to use SharePoint on the road. I am going to review iShare, iSharePhone, mDMS, Moshare and iSharePlusLite. These five apps are available form the appstore for free.

iShare did not log onto my SharePoint site so a test run was impossible. iSharePhone is also free but requires some server side stuff which is not an option and a viable model in my opinion. mDMS requires some server side stuff as well. This leaves only Moshare by Moprise and iSharePlusLite by Southlabs.

Moshare is easy to set up. My account is recognized immediately and I can browse through our portal at once. Navigation is nice but our announcements are sorted with the latest item on top and no way to change the sorting. Display of an announcement is nice and even lets you edit or delete the item! Documents can be views in both office 2003 and office 2007 formats. When viewing a document there are two options. The first is to copy a link to the clipboard and the second is an option to email a copy of a document. The latter option is somewhat unnecessary for the hardcore SharePoint users. Navigating you site structure is easy, showing subsites on every level and with the back option you can move easy. Moshare does not offer a breadcrumb so it is not easy to see where you are. Blogs and Wiki’s cannot be opened so there is a big flaw there. The app does not let you change settings so if green is not your color then you will not like the interface… Search enables you to search inside SharePoint and retrieves some great results.

SharePlusLite is a free app that has a pro version as well. Setting your portal up is straightforward. URL’s need http or https. SPL shows your subsites and content directly. Your announcements are sorted the right way, so the newest announcement is on top! The view of an announcement is not that great trying to show everything in an item, I only want the title and body that cannot be viewed directly. The icons of the announcement indicate if an attachment is present. Documents are not opened right away but PDF, office 2003 and 2007 formats are recognized.  An option is presented to email the document but not to copy the link. Icons for the different content are the same as in SharePoint. Blogs do not work in SPL (although they claim they work) but wiki pages can be viewed! Search is only filtering the items shown, no real SharePoint search here.

Actually I cannot choose… The interface of SharePlusLite is much more complete and better. But the functionality in Moshare is much better with better item viewing, editing and real search capabilities. Conclusion is that there are some apps around but quality needs some improvements, but then again what can you expect for free!

One other consideration is: is this any better than the mobile interface, standard since SharePoint 2007. Well actually the interface is quite nice but lacks the ability to browse site structure and is really simple (and loads a lot faster than the apps!).

Question remains how does this work on an iPhone 4 with SharePoint 2010?