Page II: In many organisations, expansion of Microsoft's SharePoint technologies seems to be inevitable due to unofficial grassroots adoption and standardisation on Microsoft Office. However, other options should still be evaluated, says Meta Group.
In many organisations, the collaboration infrastructure planner would have to expend significant amounts of political capital to reverse the flow of WSS and police its ongoing ban. Even if WSS has a solid position in an organisation's KWI, there are still two ways that a separate portal solution could coexist. First, a portal product could take the place of SharePoint Portal Server as a layer above a collection of Windows SharePoint Services sites (click here to view Figure 2 ).
Small groups would still use SharePoint to create sites for themselves, post documents and Web pages, and set up discussion groups, but the -uber portal" would provide application integration, single sign-on, process automation, more advanced collaboration, and content management facilities. Perhaps more important, it would also provide a federated governance layer above the Windows SharePoint Server sites to tie them together. This will not be easy at this time because portal products have limited WSS integration.
The second (and less preferable) form of coexistence would be to have two enterprise portal infrastructure stacks -- one from Microsoft and one from another vendor. Because the two portal frameworks would provide overlapping capabilities, users would determine which portal to use based on some set criteria such as job function or department. This option is less preferable because it introduces redundancies. If this option is necessary, redundancies should be reduced by having the two portal frameworks share infrastructure components (e.g., content management, usage tracking) as much as possible. A coexistence strategy still requires central IT infrastructure and architecture group involvement to ensure appropriate fit.
Governance
Portal governance must be addressed regardless of the combination of Microsoft products used to compose the portal framework and the possible presence of another coexisting portal framework. This is more of a problem for Microsoft customers because theirs is the only product that really encourages grassroots adoption by default. Products from other vendors must also be governed, but their top-down deployment approach makes this easier. Indeed, allowing groups to set up islands of disconnected SharePoint sites could cause more harm than good, as managers of ungoverned Domino deployments in the 1990s can attest.
For organisations that decide to postpone any portal decision, this becomes even more important to avoid having an enormous number of unmanaged sites in a few years.
Bottom line: Organisations should not let grassroots adoption of Microsoft's SharePoint technologies lead to an automatic enterprise decision. SharePoint is a competitive framework, but it should be evaluated to determine whether it should be the enterprise portal for the organisation, coexist with another framework, or be isolated.
Business impact: Selecting a portal framework will lay the foundation for initiatives that benefit from collaboration, information sharing, and application access.
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