One of my more challenging assignments this year has been writing a report on the opportunities and challenges that SharePoint 2010 presents to intranet managers, especially those considering an upgrade from MOSS07. The report was commissioned by the Intranet Benchmark Forum as a follow-up to a report I wrote for the IBF in 2009 on MOSS07. By that time there was already a good amount of experience available to incorporate into the report, but the SharePoint 2010 report had to be written without being able to take advantage of the wisdom of even the most early of early adopters. There are very few books yet on the market about SharePoint 2010, though Amazon lists around 90 that are due to be published before the end of the year.

The IBF report is therefore very much an introduction to SharePoint 2010. As I worked through the information released by Microsoft it became clear that the company had been listening to users and channel partners, with substantial enhancements in collaboration, search, document management, records management and business intelligence. Several weeks after writing the report I continue to discover new features and capabilities. On the downside web content management functionality is still page-based and somewhat limited. With power comes complexity, and any organisation that thought that a more robust version of MOSS07 would need less governance is going to have to reconsider its approach.

To support the launch I took part in an IBF SharePoint SIG webinar last week at which I was joined by Jed Cawthorne, Richard Harbridge and Michael Sampson, all of whom had made a significant contribution in reviewing initial drafts of the report. There were well over 100 participants in the webinar, and some very good questions were asked. Jed and Michael have both written up their take on some of the issues raised. Of course the challenge is about how you gain effective user adoption of SharePoint and Michael has just published an excellent book on User Adoption Strategies for collaboration applications which I will be reviewing in more detail in the near future.

So should you upgrade to SharePoint 2010? It will be far more than just moving up a dot release in CMS software. For a start SharePoint 2010 runs on 64bit hardware and is optimised for Office 2010, so there are challenges right from the start for the IT team. I can't stress enough the importance of having an intranet strategy, and from that assessing the value of the upgrade. I have seen far too many organisations where the intranet strategy has been shredded in favour of the corporate SharePoint strategy, and that is not a good position to be in for intranet managers and intranet users.

In the near term the best advice I can give is to take every effort to understand just what SharePoint 2010 offers and what the impact will be on your intranet. Read some books, and go on some training courses, but remember that the Microsoft communications machine is awesome, and you need to be alert to what it does not do, or the extent it may constrain you. Independent advice is essential. Good places to start are AIIM and the Real Story Group or join one of the JBoye Communities of Practice.

Martin White