Bill English of Mindsharp has given me a contract to write two chapters of the SharePoint Portal Admin Companion, to be published by Microsoft Press. My responsibilities are to write:
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The architecture chapter, and
- The chapter on SharePoint and Project Server integration.
Needless to say this is a great challenge and an honor. To get ready for the assignment, I’ve spent the past week working through the 2007 version of these products with Bill and his team at MindSharp. Also present have been the team from Combined Knowledge in the U.K., and P3C Consulting also from the U.K. It’s been great fun to explore the 2007 software with this team and begin to organize my thoughts on Microsoft's new architecture. Here is my initial reaction… “Wow.” This is a new era for Microsoft.
Regulatory changes like HIPAA and Sarbanes Oxley have mandated the need to provide information management, protection, and process control across the enterprise. It is no longer enough to write a letter using Word. It is now important to be able to show why the letter was written, to whom it was sent, what was in it, and how the information was derived, and how the information impacted decisions that were made.
This means that the ability to manage, protect, audit, distribute, redact, and destroy information must be an enterprise infrastructure service that permeates all systems. This is, in my opinion, the next big thing in information technology. Microsoft is “stepping up to the plate” in a big way.
In the past, client/server architecture was a huge shift in architecture and process. In the beginning it was treated as a unique, awkward, and controversial technology. Now it is a normal and pervasive part of the IT landscape. It is a natural and organic part of operations, and no one really thinks about it much any more.
The same was true for e-commerce and e-business, remember? It was awkward, new, and seemed quite unnatural. E-commerce and e-business technologies are now a normal and organic part of the IT landscape as well. It is a natural and organic part of operations, and no one really thinks about it much any more.
Document and workflow management strategies will, I think, be in the same category. The idea of integrating and managing the flow of information (as opposed to data) throughout an organization’s technology base seems bewildering and confusing. It seems like the industry is making “much ado about nothing.” In five to ten years, the idea of producing uncontrolled “orphaned” documents without having to consider their source and audience will seem as bizarre as using a dumb-terminal would today.
Microsoft is making a giant leap toward this integration goal. Where they have lagged in the beginning phases of past technology shifts, they obviously intend to be in the forefront of integrating document management capabilities into their software infrastructure.