Back in October at the huge SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, Christian Buckley, (one of my SharePoint speakers at TEC) and I, had a conversation about what it means for a product or technology to be a “disruptor” and whether SharePoint (and SharePoint 2010, specifically) fit the criteria. According to the Uber source of uncontested knowledge and wisdom, Wikipedia, a disruptive technology describes an innovation that “improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers.”

ECM was ECM until SharePoint came along when lines were drawn between various the factions of portal solutions, collaboration solutions, ahoc team and group solutions.  Then SharePoint came along and came up with it’s thoughts that, why can’t we do all of these things, do it cheaper and more efficient.  It eyed up collaboration, it eyed up portals, it eyed up document management, enterprise search, records management, and BI.  So many markets.  What it did right was seeing were the businesses were really spending a lot of cash and realizing that despite the fact that companies shell out a ton of cash for some of these specialized solutions they aren’t that perfect in the way they do things.  There were a few weak links in the chain and while that chain might be strong in some areas it was short, yet well defined.  Instead of targeting one of Gartners Magic Quadrants it decided which ones it would allow partners to stretch it to. (Essentially each version we’ve seen it gather in enterprise backend acronym after acronym.  “SharePoint 2010 is Poised for Broader Enterprise Adoption” by Gartner – October 19, 2010)

The Enterprise Collaboration Platform itself in the corporation can be traced to the thought leadership of SharePoint.  While many of the SharePoint core innards can be traced back to FrontPage Server Extensions (_vit_bin), Site Server (audiences), SQL (SQL Dashboards) and MSSearch (ok now we use FAST).  It has evolved into the fastest revenue generating product in MS history which does make you even wonder if it beats out the best of drugs, cures for cancer.  It’s quite easy to trace the fact that it has accomplished much in it’s short ~10 year history as SharePoint.

Even in the social realm people would say, man SharePoint is late to the enterprise 2.0 game, but in actuality they’d be totally wrong.  SharePoint has been defining that space before it was called as such, and has also beat some of key concepts to the consumer space.  It is fair to say that SharePoint deployments have benefited from users learning how to blog on the internet, connect with users on facebook, and share videos and pictures.  Definitely teaches them how to use SharePoint better, it also better helps them define requirements, and gives us a language we can all speak.

Improving a product in the way the market doesn’t expect

1. SharePoint really defined the enterprise profiles and personal spaces. From Jeff Teper’s History post on SharePoint “The team proposed we give every user their own personalized site and is still very proud they shipped it in 2003 before there was a MySpace or Facebook.”  SPS 2003 My sites shipping in mid 2003 actually preceded even early myspace.com in Aug 2003.  Not saying they stole the idea, which apparently may have had some to do with Flickster (What’s that?).  While myspace isn’t my favorite place to hang out on the internet these days, they did do much to help define why we need a profile and what it means to create a persona and why it’s important to be connected.  In the corporate space it isn’t so much about the full creativity aspects, but more about building the right networks that cross the boundaries. It is quickly becoming the personal hub for the enterprise and adoption of my sites is sure to become more and more standard with SharePoint 2010 and the core of the social revolution in SharePoint 2010.  Going back further the site server profiles and audiences which carried over to SPS 2001 even gave us a glimpse of what would come.

2. The first enterprise shipping wiki solution was Sharepoint.  I’m not saying it was before wikipedia or open source messing around type projects, but when you start talking about enterprise shipping muscle it was the first for real scale.   The Wiki inventor actually worked at Microsoft.  I personally remember using an internal site called wiki/wiki.  From December 2003 until October 2005, Ward Cunningham (wiki inventor) worked for Microsoft Corporation in the "patterns & practices" group.  Essentially wikis and blogs were both included in the shipping SharePoint 2007 which shipped in Nov 2006.  If you were to look at the dates on the specs, you’d likely find that this functionality was actually spec’ed out in 2004.  Using blogs and wikis in enterprises wasn’t really on the lips much at that time.  Now it’s obviously much easier to explain how these adhoc tools built into a platform add some serious value, especially when you realize they’ve been in the foundation since their inception.  (Someone like Ward may remember this history better, but I’m sure SharePoint definitely beat all its competitors to market.)

Cost

How about pretty much free?  The wiki and blog functionality in the early days was definitely a disruptor in the enterprise and made a few people confused.  The portal product while the positioning around RM, ECM, WCM and Enteprise Search in 2007 came together, it easily undercut it’s competitors and made it difficult to compare any product with it’s offering.  Compare SharePoint with renewing your license of Notes or Documentum.  Actually I did a webcast on this with Steve Walch, on how SharePoint 2010 Will Impact your Notes Migration, the PPT deck is on my slideshare.

Making SharePoint Designer free still has yet to make it’s wave.  Will SharePoint 2010 bring that disruption?

Can Anything Really be Disruptive in SharePoint 2010?

1. BI is something SharePoint has been eyeing and working with SQL to accomplish the true mission of Business Intelligence for the Masses.  The business connectivity in Sharepoint 2010 pointing to SQL, Oracle or essentially any ADO.NET datasource or web services integration.  Not only full CRUD, but also offline and rich integration with Office 2010.  Pushing SharePoint PerformancePoint into SharePoint Server, wow now that’s pushing BI to the masses.  Will definitely be interesting to see how this not only is disruptive to competitors it definitely lowers the barrier.  No longer separate deployments, you’ll see people flipping the switch and giving more and more access to these powerful solutions for providing rich views of information.

1. The first thing that has big potential is composite apps bringing together the functionality and building things.  For example using the streaming video right out of SharePoint with silverlight webparts.  Can we say, YouTube for the enterprise?  Tack up a management solution with Digital Asset Management with enterprise meta data, ratings, built in search, and social tagging.  Making the pages even easier to edit with other digital asset management is the other side.  Nothing keeps SharePoint from being an enterprise Flickr repository either.  While it would seem there has been some level of catch up with things like tagging and document ID for records, but the activity feeds and social application space in SharePoint 2010 really have some potential.  It’s imagination, that’s what’s required.

3. How about the enhancements in SharePoint 2010 for developers.  While it was tough to swallow before, and required some dancing.  Not so any more.  The broad embrace of .NET developers has yet to prove SharePoint the defacto enterprise standard for deploying applications in the enterprise.  Is this possible?  Quite so.  SharePoint has become infrastructure in the enterprise.  It just may take a bit more time for IT to realize SharePoint as the application platform as it’s grown from it’s file sharing stigma that keeps it from becoming something greater.  The enhancements this time around may really prove to move it from that portal and file sharing tool, to the platform of choice for developers for business applications.  You don’t have to look far to see the built in features around workflow, security, policies, document sets, scalable lists, and true HA support to see this opportunity to shake up the datacenter and move from a 2 web front end Sharepoint environment used for simple out of the box collaboration solution to something of a substantial hosting platform for applications, portals, ECM, Search, social, and on and on.  The wave has not crested yet!