The cause of 'SharePoint sprawl'

by James Lappin

SharePoint is taking on some of the features of a monopoly.  It is becoming a byword for Enterprise Content Management, as 'iPod' is a byword for music players and 'Google' is a byword for search.  If an information need bubbles up in an organisation, someone, somewhere is going to say 'can we do that with SharePoint?'

 

SharePoint seems to be everywhere.   You know there is a ball of string somewhere in your dad's shed, in everyone's dad shed.  You know there are some SharePoint licences kicking around in your organisation, in everyone's organisation.

If you haven't chosen it for your document and records management system then your organisation will still end up considering SharePoint for your intranet, or your website, or for collaboration, or for an attempt at introducing some form of social networking. 

When you purchase SharePoint 2007 for your intranet you aren't just buying an intranet module of SharePoint. SharePoint  isn't a suite of modules, it is an integrated product. When you purchase SharePoint to roll-out as an intranet you are getting far more than just the SharePoint publishing sites, which are intended for the type of content traditionally posted to an intranet. Instead you are getting all of the different types of SharePoint site, including:

• team sites  (a place for  a team or work group to collaborate on documents and other outputs, store documents, share news, and display and manipulate key data) 
• my sites (providing each individual with a storage area, and a means of communicating information about themselves to the rest of the organisation) 
• all of the other specialist types of site you can set up in SharePoint, including  document workspaces (where people can collaborate around one particular document), wiki sites, and meeting workspaces (where people can plan and record one meeting)

If you choose SharePoint for your intranet and chose to turn on team collaboration sites, unexpected consequences may occur.  If the implementation team rolling out SharePoint are primarily accustomed to rolling out intranets, where a small percentage of the organisation contribute a small percentage of their team's information, then they may be unprepared for the chaos that can ensue from an uncontrolled roll-out of SharePoint team collaboration sites. 

Team collaboration sites are meant to accomodate the messy day-to-day work of teams and work groups.   You might hope that each team makes do with one team site,  in which they house as many document libraries as they need, for all the different projects that they undertake, accompanied by collaborative goodies such as a shared calendar, a shared contact list etc.    But in practice the team site will be sprouting sub-sites like there is no tomorrow.  

When a new project starts the desire will come for a new sub-site, like a fresh new exercise book at the start of school term, to accomodate the specific communications and information preferences of the group working on the project.  Each sub-site can, in turn, accomodate as many document libraries as its owners want, and sprout as many sub-sites, meeting workspaces, wiki sites, document workspaces etc. as its owners need. You can see where the phenomenon known as 'SharePoint sprawl' comes from!

Comments

[Sofia Neto]

In my opinion, Sharepoint can cause retrieval problems, and what was supposed to be an collaborative site is now a large notebook that only you would understand.

Sharepoint, and other ECM produts like Alfresco ( why not be open source?) have to be handled with a good information management policy and with solid information management practices...

As you know... "too much information, is no information".