I thought I’d start by talking a little about how SharePoint fits into Microsoft’s broad goals of helping information workers be more productive. Those of you who have spent time with SharePoint Products and Technologies may find this redundant, but hopefully I can provide you with some additional insights even still. If you’re sure that’s not possible, then feel free to stop reading and wait for a more interesting posting to follow. J
First, we think of SharePoint as fitting into a broader goal of providing a rich collaboration environment for users. Collaboration is a pretty fuzzy term in the industry. Let me clarify how we think about collaboration. We don’t think that collaboration is a place you go to. We think it’s a set of tools that you have available to you in the context of how you already work. So we talk about delivering “pervasive” collaboration, meaning we want to infuse collaboration into how you work. For example, in WSS v2 (the currently shipping version), we created a feature called the Document Workspace where you can collaborate on authoring a document with others. Since we knew that people most often share documents via email, we added a feature to Outlook to prompt the user when they attach a document to an email message as to whether they would like to create a Document Workspace for the attachment, so others can get updated versions of the document as the contents change, see who else is working on the document through presence, and see tasks lists for the document. This is just one example of thinking of collaboration as not existing in yet another system you have to learn but rather occurring naturally within the context of what you’re already doing.
This brings in another key element of our approach to collaboration – supporting both “rich” and “reach” access. We think there are great collaboration scenarios that we can enable within the “rich” Office clients, such as the one I described above, and we also believe in “reach” access to collaboration spaces, via the web browser and mobile devices. To us it’s all about making sure customers can access their information from anywhere and providing the user experience that best fits the particular scenario.
So our approach is to provide “pervasive” collaboration capabilities via a broad set of Microsoft products that work together to solve user problems. We think about those solutions as falling into four large buckets: Integrated Communications, Collaborative Workspaces, Access to People and Information, and People-driven Processes:
· Integrated Communications: Enable people to more effectively manage their communications. Enable them to triage their communications effectively. Let them select whatever communications mechanism works best for them (email, IM, RTC, VOIP) and transition from one method of communicating to another effortlessly. Many of our investments in Outlook, Exchange, and RTC are to accomplish this goal.
· Collaborative Workspaces: Provide spaces for people to work on projects together in the context of the work they are doing. Facilitate high value collaborative activities like collaborative authoring and meetings. This is where Windows SharePoint Services fits in. It also includes our investments in Groove as rich, task-oriented, peer-to-peer workspaces.
· Access to People and Information: Enable people to find the information they need to do their jobs by either browsing to it from an organization’s portals, searching for it, or being proactively notified about it. Since much of the information they want to find will be newly created in collaborative workspaces, we built our portal product, SharePoint Portal Server, on top of a foundation of Windows SharePoint Services. This means customers can deploy a single infrastructure for information sharing in their organization and only have to learn a single way to manage and customize portals and collaboration spaces. Finding people is also a key scenario for us, since often times the most topical information is the information still in people’s heads. This is where SharePoint Portal Server “MySites” come in as a place for people to share information and expertise with others.
· People-driven Processes: When you have a rich information sharing environment, as SharePoint is, it is natural to want to integrate business processes in with team spaces and portals. In the Office 12 release, we have invested in integrating workflow into SharePoint and into the Microsoft Office applications, so people can build spaces that automate key business processes. For example, a marketing team space might want to include workflows associated with approving a marketing plan or enable the team to kick off related purchase requests that are submitted directly to back-end ERP systems using rich forms, such as InfoPath, which is available as a server service in the Office 12 release.
So hopefully this gives you a sense that we think of collaboration from a very broad vantage point. This broad viewpoint drives us to think about features in our collaboration products in terms of the end-to-end scenarios that we are enabling for customers. We often invest in features that cross over several products, but we do so in a way that is logical to the end user because our efforts are scenario-based. It also pushes us to invest in features that go beyond traditional definitions of collaboration. A good example of this is our inclusion of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) features in the upcoming release of SharePoint Portal Server. This decision derives from two primary observations. First, with the growing popularity of SharePoint, more and more critical business content is ending up in SharePoint sites. Customers want a way to manage that content effectively. This need to manage collaboration content is particularly acute with the introduction of regulations like Sarbanes Oxley. Second, ECM features like workflow and policy are the next set of features our customers are asking for to support the collaborative authoring scenario itself.
But ECM and SharePoint is probably a topic best left for another blog submission. The main point for this entry is to talk about how we think of collaboration very broadly, from the perspective of end user scenarios, and with the notion of facilitating not only collaboration itself, but the related activities of communicating with others, finding information, and engaging in business processes.
- Kurt DelBene
