Will SharePoint Meet Same Fate As Lotus Notes?

According to CMS Watch, an Olney, Md.-based research firm, there are fundamental similarities between the growth paths of SharePoint and Lotus Notes, which had its heyday in the 1990s. CMS Watch's view is that with both Lotus Notes and SharePoint, flexibility is a double edged sword, and the ease with which custom applications can be built on the platform poses challenges for IT staff.

SharePoint also suffers from shortcomings with regard to its collaboration capabilities and lacks the scalability and administrative controls necessary to make it viable for enterprise deployments, according to CMS Watch.

Tim Huckaby, CEO of Interknowlogy, Carlsbad, Calif., believes that SharePoint is getting critiqued under the weight of its own success, and that Microsoft hasn't quite learned how to be a vertical software company.

"Sharepoint is basically this giant, extensible ASP.Net application, and it's not turnkey by any stretch of the imagination. It takes a lot of custom application development to 'do it right'," said Huckaby. "Companies are quickly recognizing that SharePoint right out of the box isn't enough, and that has caused a bit of frustration."

According to Huckaby, the same scenario was observed with Lotus Notes once organizations began trying to extend the software, hardware, and network architecture.

"In the late 1990s, when Lotus Notes started getting popular, we saw a proliferation of applications that were departmental solutions, not enterprise wide solutions," said Huckaby. "Before IT knew what was going on, there were 100 Lotus Notes apps running in the organization with no visibility to IT, and we're seeing the same thing happening today with SharePoint."

Kevin Baylor, principal at Aequus IT, a solution provider in Bradenton, Fla., agrees with the premise that SharePoint's flexibility could poses challenges for IT staff.

"We have clients with large Sharepoint installations that are going off on their own tangents and doing different things, and then realizing they can only go so far with their integration if they don't have Outlook 2007 installed," he said.

"From an extranet standpoint, SharePoint gives you a lot of flexibility, but depending on the size of the company, if you try to integrate different Web pieces into it you can run into roadblocks," added Baylor.

But Ric Opal, vice president of Peters and Associates, an Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based solution provider, discounts comparisons between SharePoint and Lotus Notes. "We're in a different era, and the entire industry is different now than it was then," he said.

"With the applications being deployed on Sharepoint, the back end is SQL Server, which is robust and used by tons of applications. It's an industry standard database that just about anyone can write to," said Opal.

As for SharePoint's scalability limitations, Opal said "that's going to hold true with any technology if you don't properly architect a solution sitting on top of a database."

Recent indications that Microsoft is working to add new functionality to SharePoint suggest that the vendor isn't planning to rest on its laurels with SharePoint, says Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at twentysix New York, a New York-based IT consultancy.

"Microsoft is already working on a set of Silverlight controls specifically for SharePoint, and this will have a beneficial impact on usability," said Brust. "There is room for improving the user interface in SharePoint, and my sense is that they are looking very hard at that."