Ian Morrish, a Senior Consultant for SharePoint at Microsoft New Zealand has posted three session abstracts for the upcoming Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Seattle. These three sessions are being presented by customers using SharePoint, and are about their use of SharePoint for collaboration. Ian says that:

“SharePoint and Collaboration, yes you can!

I don’t know what your definition of collaboration is but I’m looking forward to some of the SharePoint Conference sessions that are being presented by customers.
(Seems to fly in the face of some analysts who say SharePoint can’t do this 😉“

My comment to Ian on his blog was this:

Ian, thanks for sharing these. I would love to be there to listen and learn, particularly since I’m the analyst you are calling into question.

Two points of feedback.

Firstly, without an objective standard as to what “collaboration” is and means, then you are free to claim that SharePoint can indeed support “collaboration”. It appears to me that you have just validated the entire reason for writing the 7 Pillars framework back in 2005 — to give organizations an organizational-centric framework for evaluating different vendor products and determining where and how they worked or didn’t in supporting team collaboration. Otherwise we have 1000 different vendors claiming to offer “collaboration” tools, but with very little insight as a result.

Secondly, the three case studies that you have linked to appear to perfectly match the conclusion in my white paper … co.michaelsampson.net/sp7p.html … that SharePoint is suitable as a Pillar 1 product, that is for collaboration use cases where Shared Access to Team Data is required. I don’t see these customers talking about the other Pillars where I argue from the facts about SharePoint in light of the 7 Pillars framework that SharePoint fails in 4 out of the 7 areas.

Have a great time at the conference!

M.