My response to the question, “what do you do for a living”? can vary depending on how much patience the person I am talking to appears to have, from ”I work in IT”, ”I build intranets of a sort” to the outright, ”I am a SharePoint Specialist.” I am normally then presented with one of two responses:

“Oh SharePoint, yeah I know SharePoint” which is either true, false or mostly somewhere in between not really knowing and not caring.

“What is SharePoint?” is the golden question. Every time a person asked me that question outside of the office I would love to sit them down and passionately let them know what it is and all the magical things it can do, but I think I would stop getting invited to parties.

So what actually is it to those who care?

• Collaboration?
• Business Intelligence?
• Records Management?
• Information Management?
• Business Process Management?

The key point is, its lots of things and a lot of other things all mixed in between, ultimately it’s a diverse business tool.

The current state of SharePoint

Truly since 2010 I think it has not really been as much the “current state of SharePoint” so much as a current state of mind. To us in the know it’s a diverse and powerful tool for any business, however it is more often than not referred to by our users as a complete pain in the a$$. And they are right (aren’t they always) for too long too many people have been making SharePoint a begrudgingly steep learning curve for our users or implementing a business critical system which is always going down.

For most of us, if we thought really hard into those suppressed memories, we can remember what we first saw when SharePoint was introduced to us and why we are all such hugely patient people now. For us, we got paid to get past the brick walls. A business user can only see a new unnecessary challenge completely outside the scope of the other day to day rubbish they have to deal with. They are constantly having their attention levels drained far too fast and the poor IT Executives are continually trying to justify the madness to users, the stakeholders and themselves, because let’s face it, it did cost a lot of money to implement.

Thankfully this is not a wholly accurate representation, there are of course those of us who spend our time doing what’s right for our users, painstakingly working on governance plans, training schedules and improvements to aid adoption. For us though the bad deployments have become an unfortunate and very common sight and the reality is that it’s not always the SharePoint team’s fault. Pressure from executives, the wrong project team, bad planning and so on, can all add to the difficulties. There will always be a lot of people in any business who want a piece of SharePoint and believe they should have more control over its delivery than someone else.

To make things easier for our poor users we experts can do things like governance, training and adoption plans. Developing/Coding something that makes it all easier is another: a web part, a workflow, a shiny user interface. These solutions can themselves present a whole new and fundamental set of issues. A .Net Developer who doesn’t know SharePoint, highly customised and non-upgradeable solutions, badly written back end solutions draining server resources, custom solutions that for some reason badly replace SharePoint standard functionality,  unknown and very unfriendly errors to name but a few, we have all seen them.

Ultimately our good friend SharePoint over the years has been given an incredibly bad name and mostly through no fault of its own, it’s been in a state of growth, almost like a teen fighting through a pubescent phase.

The future of SharePoint

I have only worked With SharePoint for five or so years but I have surprisingly seen every single version in production. There is hope, I do still believe the future is incredibly bright for SharePoint.

Microsoft have been understandably upset that one of their glorious children has been getting a bad rap and they are looking to redeem it. In 2013 we saw some serious modern user interface changes, the previously purchased FAST Search was integrated as SharePoint Search incredibly well and everything was geared up to link with Office365. Apps (now add-ins) were introduced and while they still need plenty of work and investment there is potential. We also saw some serious effort put into introducing JavaScript and REST APIs.

Many of us before 2013 was released had feared that we would be losing the on-premise farm and everything would be bundled into the cloud, where Microsoft can protect its honour, and I don’t believe the changes were a coincidental alignment. Luckily for us on-premise remains, I believe this dramatic push was probably reconsidered as it would no doubt have killed the product there and then and most experts would abandon hope. Unfortunately for the doubters of cloud-based SharePoint, it’s not over. You only have to look at the large majority of training and Ignite talks that focus on cloud-based, Office365 and hybrid deployments. Microsoft still clearly intend to push us away from on-premise as well as trying to protect the servers from harm by nudging developers into the add-in space and front end development, thus protecting SharePoint’s reputation while also bringing it more in-line with modern techniques and languages. Subsequently this will also attract a larger set of web developers into the mix.

As IT experts we all know that we have to adapt to stay relevant, but some people really fail to do so, they get so trapped in the past and how things were in the glory days that they forget to accept a good change when they see one, this is what I hear from an unfortunately large majority of SharePoint experts I meet and see posting on the internet. 

Right now with SharePoint its hugely important to adapt, SharePoint 2016 is just around the corner more and more companies are in a good position, from developing better strategies, to keep their deployments modern. It’s up to us as the guiding light and flag bearers of SharePoint to promote its new features the right way and use it properly, not get stuck in the past.

What is SharePoint? What can SharePoint be for you?

Colin Cook is a SharePoint Specialist who blogs at http://www.fluid-sharepoint.com/