tfpl blog

Records management in SharePoint - the debate continues

Author: John Davies
TFPL, Senior Records and Information Management Consultant

Have just read a stimulating post by James Lappin on his blog examining the possibilities of SharePoint for records management.  Now, this is the current hot topic (in RM circles at least) and revolves around the question of whether SharePoint 2010 can provide the functionality (or some of the functionality) of a conventional EDRMS.  Microsoft claims it can but do not, as James points out, intend to seek certification against DoD 5015.2 or MoReq 2 and while SharePoint 2010 can do a form of records management, it is records management as defined by Microsoft, not as defined by the international records management community. 

So exactly what is this Microsoft version of records management?  Well, the Records Centre familiar to users of SharePoint 2007 is still there in 2010 and has some additional features.  Putting aside the question of how or how well it works, the Records Centre offers the possibility of doing records management the traditional way; that is, moving a digital object identified as a “record” out of the care of its creator or custodian into a secure place managed on behalf of the organisation.  However, Microsoft then goes on to present an alternative to the Records Centre by allowing users to “declare” records in situ in a team site.  Once declared, the records stay where they are and do not have to be moved to the Records Centre.  So, two models of records management are now on offer:  centralised vs. dispersed control.  How do we make sense of this?  

Our answer is…it depends.  It depends on what sort of organisation you work for and what, if any, records management you need.  If you work for a global energy company and are subject to an immense array of regulations, you will need to pay attention to records management.  You will have to deal with the reality that information is created and managed in many different places using a range of different IT applications including line of business systems and probably more than one EDRMS.  It will not be possible to put all information/records in one “records centre” and at best you will maintain a map of the repositories you know about and try to set some standards for how these are managed. 

If you work for a small public sector agency, a small third sector organisation or a small company or partnership, you could almost certainly get by with using file shares (with some conventions about naming and versioning) and would consider introducing SharePoint as a great leap forward.  You might have some records (very few, perhaps) that need the level of curation made possible by the Records Centre and will certainly have many that can be happily managed in a file share or in situ in a team site.  

It seems to me that Microsoft is offering alternatives which are not exclusive but which the records management community chooses to position as polar opposites.  Irrespective of what it is, there is no sense in arguing for just one model, one system, one corporate approach, today when so many organisations (across every sector) are down sizing, merging, diversifying, splitting, or taking advantage of shared service arrangements.   

Just look at the following list of information domains found in most organisations to see what diversity of approaches exists:

• Formal corporate records e.g. legal instruments, committee minutes and papers, policies, annual reports:  born digital, managed in hard and soft copy, published to the web and/or intranet, preserved long term in an archive or EDRM solution
• Case records:  often managed using a bespoke line of business system where they remain until disposition. 
• Operational support records e.g. finance, HR: often managed using a bespoke line of business system where they remain until disposition. 
• Project records:  complicated assemblies of documents often worked on by multiple members of a project team both inside and outside organisations.  Fertile soil for collaborative software.
• Less well defined (unstructured) working documents:  the documents filling up file shares and team sites that represent the glorious richness and inconsistency of everyday working life.  Often considered a records management nightmare, the majority of these documents do not require long-term preservation and control and might benefit from an in situ records management approach
• Email:  a slough of despond for records managers, if you can’t buy an email archive product, leave email where it is.  It’s better kept in its native application.  Life is too short to drag and drop it somewhere else!

James concludes correctly that “SharePoint is now a mature collaboration system, having gone through several iterations of the product” but I would say that what it offers by way of records management is just that – what it offers.  The debate about what SharePoint does and how it does it will properly continue and we are working with a number of organisations who have embarked on SharePoint implementations for a whole variety of reasons unrelated to records management.  Records managers, meanwhile, must take a metaphorical step back and think hard about the fact that in 21st century organisations records management cannot remain as it used to be.

An update from training and events

Author: Claire Valentine
TFPL, Training Manager

 

With the summer holidays upon us our course schedule is taking a break too.  Demand we saw in the spring for Records Management and Web 2.0 training has continued through the past few months.  The big topics of today seem to be about getting your house in order and proving the value of the service you are providing as an information and knowledge professional.  This could be reflective of the courses that have seen the most demand this year, using technology that is low cost like Web 2.0 to work more innovatively.  In addition ensuring compliance to rules and regulations, plus better information storage organisation through records management training.

Since my last training post we have had a new addition to the training and events team, Nina Benscher who is in charge of developing and running all of our networks and events.  As SharePoint continues to be another popular subject especially with the release of SharePoint 2010, Nina is producing the programme for our, now annual, October event.  This year it will be taking forward the theme of obtaining value and looking at ‘unlocking the knowledge and information management potential’. As usual you’ll have a chance to learn and network with your peers and experts, with interesting case studies from organisations such as; Department of Education, BAE Systems and National Grid for more details visit www.tfpl.com/sharepoint.

SharePoint features in our autumn schedule too as demand; particularly for the records management aspect has led us to put another date in before we finish the year.  The full timetable from September to December is now confirmed and available through the course calendar.  We are expecting that the themes we have seen this year will continue through the autumn and winter course but would be keen to know your opinions on this. 

Join TFPL for the launch of SharePoint 2010

Author: Edward Taylor
Consultant, TFPL

At TFPL we are keenly awaiting the simultaneous UK launch of Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.  To increase the hype Microsoft are hosting a virtual launch event starting at 3pm on the 12th May and you can watch this online. Our consultants John Davies, Martin Sanderson, Edward Taylor and Colin Frankland will be tuning in and Tweeting the event as it happens. We’ll use the hashtag #sharepoint. We will be looking out for any interesting developments from the world of Records, Knowledge and Information Management and adding our thoughts. The launch will include a live keynote and Q&A Session which will be an excellent opportunity to hear about the latest advancements of this ever popular platform, first hand from the people who built it.

To coincide with the launch we have been working hard at TFPL in developing and learning the Beta version of SharePoint 2010 and what it has to offer. Over the coming weeks we will be providing a commentary on our findings about the various pieces of functionality available on SharePoint 2010. The first instalment will be posted soon on the TFPL blog and our Linked-In Group - TFPL SharePoint Interest Group.  We will be giving an overview of the key changes and improvements that have been made with SharePoint 2010, telling you about our hands-on experience and what we thought of it.

Please feel free to tell us your own experiences of the Beta version and if you would like us to investigate any particular area of functionality that you are interested in let us know.

SharePoint offers new opportunities for information specialists

Author: Martin Sanderson
TFPL, Senior Consultant

Remembering Ralph Poole’s reflection in his past blog post that the days when IT developers managed (often with little or no success) all the processes for systems and user requirements analysis may be coming to an end with the arrival of SharePoint platforms.  With SharePoint much of the functionality is preconfigured and the most important prerequisite (and challenge) is deciding how to organize and present information to support users in their day to day operations and tasks. Poole concluded that “Unfortunately, for developers, this means MOSS 2007 needs configuration rather than development”.  Perhaps this is even more so with the introduction of SharePoint 2010.  So move over developers and move in information specialists who are well equipped to deal with information architecture, content types, metadata, search configuration and site navigation.

SharePoint 2010: what it means for information professionals and their organisations

I recently made a trip to Microsoft for a workshop on SharePoint 2010 at their campus in Reading.  The picture I took away is of a shift in focus away from development to configuration (and there's a hell of a lot more to configure), illustrated by the following:   

• Complex (or simple) records and document management policies (compliant with DoD 5015.02, amongst other things) can now be configured into the system at and across every level and site location, or simply determined ad hoc.  It looks like a complete EDRMS is on the cards with hierarchical (file-plan like) structuring, automatic document ID numbers and-all with a highly intuitive and attractive browser (any browser) based user interface. 
• Developers will no longer be needed to come in and hack into your SharePoint in order for it to communicate with other databases and systems.  All of this can be configured out of the box without any knowledge of or ostensible use of code.
• As a result of the above and because the development engine, Visual Studio 2010 (sold separately of course), is integrated into the Central Admin area I think that significant investment on bespoke coding is a thing of the past. For example, .NET coding can as easily be published to SharePoint 2010 as a document might be through a standard CMS. In addition to this, the .NET coding language is relatively easy to pick up for quick learners, which systems admins usually are.
• My opinion is that outlay in development will revolve around (app by app) bespoke applications development which has been readily facilitated through the provision of APIs meaning that apps can be built and rolled out through the Central Admin (or the ‘back office’) development tool-kit.

On cost, for organisations that have made a sizable resource commitment to MOSS 2007 already, the prospect of further investment in SharePoint 2010 might initially be a turn off[*].  If however they are persuaded by the additional functionality (particularly in what was formerly business intelligence, the records centre and mySite) then they still face the requirement to upgrade their hardware to x64 (currently it is x32). This x64 backroom hardware is needed to effectively accommodate technologies such as ajax which make for seamless and smooth user operability on the client side but demand significant resources from the servers to that end. This demand scales up with increases in user numbers and user activity, which will be a significant consideration if organisations start adopting SharePoint as a “full featured business platform”, as Microsoft is touting it.

Additionally, upgrade/migration from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint was not something that was readily covered and I suspect 2007 users may be in for a rougher ride, price-wise and technically, than they might otherwise have expected.  This may be a particular issue to those organisations that invested heavily in 3rd party bespoke development of the product.

So, how significant is the advent of SharePoint 2010 to the information professional? Well, we have always known that information architecture, information governance (inclusive of its pillars such as policies, rules etc) and sound information management in general are critical to the success of any electronic information system deployment.  And, with the removal of significant functionality barriers in SharePoint 2010, the continued importance of this cannot be stressed enough in giving systems administrators something to consider before bending to every whim of their users. 

It is therefore critical that the advice of the information professional is heeded at the highest levels of management and engendered into the IT psyche.  The blueprints of a successful implementation should be drawn up, highlighted, championed and followed from the very beginning, lest the onset of “SharePoint Sprawl”, a symptom of poor information architecture and a lack of information management forethought, generally; and one with which many, if not most, MOSS 2007 implementations contend.

If you have information management concerns around your deployment of SharePoint, or any other system, contact us for expert advice and solutions.

Authored by Shooresh Golzari, tfpl consultant.

[*] Recent conversations with clients and SharePoint integrators indicate that this is true.

TFPL SharePoint survey

For the past two years, TFPL has been monitoring the impact that SharePoint implementations have had on knowledge, records and information management activities.  During that time, we have held three successful one-day conferences looking at lessons learned through case studies and keynote papers.  

Our fourth conference is taking place on 15 October and will feature a number of new case studies, together with an update on the progress of an Eduserv research project investigating the use of SharePoint in Higher Education Institutions.

We now want to gather more information about the use and impact of SharePoint and have developed a short, web-based questionnaire which we are inviting you to complete.  The survey should take you no more than five minutes to complete and we will share the results with you via our blog and website.

Please click on the following link to participate in the survey; the survey will accept responses until 31st October.

[Please note that the survey is now closed and the link has been removed]

The Consultancy team.

SharePoint for Records Management - continued.....

Following on from comments raised from James Lappin's post back in February our Consultant Edward Taylor had the following comments:

Personally I do agree that SharePoint is capable of substituting a file plan to a certain extent, provided you are not hoping SharePoint will give you the functionality to carry out EDRM.  In many cases an organisations main aim of using SharePoint is to enhance collaboration; and the combination of using Content Types and Columns allows enough metadata to be gathered when uploading new information to meet the needs of most users.  For this to be a success those implementing SharePoint must understand the different types of content they are managing through SharePoint and assign a suitable strategy to gather the information and where to store it via document libraries etc.  It is also important to consider the needs of the user and not to expect them to enter a vast array of metadata to satisfy the needs of an information worker to upload a document – speak to the users, carry out piloting on sample groups and try to understand what is important metadata that must be entered and data that is nice to have but not required. 

I also agree with the opinion that SharePoint Sprawl has the potential to cause SharePoint to become ineffective and therefore it must be governed accordingly (this cannot be stressed enough), ensuring that there is consistency in how is it managed and used across all departments.  For example an organisation must ensure that when new Team Sites are created existing content types are used rather than creating new ones, this allows information to flow across the organisation effectively.  If SharePoint is ungoverned information silos can develop along with problems that are more often associated with shared drives.      

In terms of applying retention schedules and the ability to put records on hold; this is possible and requires the use of the SharePoint Records Centre, however its functionality has not be well received and fails to meet the needs of most users requiring an EDRMS.  We will be keeping a keen eye on the release of SharePoint 2010 later in the year to see what changes they have made to RM.   Further information on this topic has been written by a good friend James Lappin who has provided an excellent piece on Records Management in SharePoint which is well worth a read - http://thinkingrecords.co.uk/2009/04/19/how-records-management-works-in-sharepoint-2007/.  As for the other areas in SharePoint I would say keep trying new things with the users to see what is popular and what is not.  At TFPL we have been trying out the Wiki pages to allow our consultants to brainstorm and develop ideas and strategies for different sectors that we work in which is proving to be useful and a handy way for our consultants to collaborate. 

 

SharePoint 2007: The key questions for records management

In the recent past the records management profession did not have to concern itself too deeply with any one system from any one vendor.  The profession could establish specifications as to what it wanted records management software to do (TNA 2002, MoReq etc) and use those standards to incentivise a clutch of vendors to produce systems that operate according to that model.  Records managers simply had to understand the thinking behind the specifications.

SharePoint 2007 is different.  It hasn’t been designed around existing records management specifications, instead it has its own idiosyncratic records management model.  SharePoint team collaboration sites pose significant governance challenges and are sometimes introduced alongside, and in competition with, existing electronic records systems.  

The vendor behind SharePoint, Microsoft, already monopolises organisational servers and the basic desktop tools for document creation and e-mail. Their exceptional size brings with it exceptional ambitions.  They want to sell SharePoint into every organisation large medium or small.  They don't want to base their product around the types of records management controls (particularly the corporate fileplan) found in TNA 2002 and MoReq 2.  Only a minority of organisations have the appetite and capability to implement and sustain a corporate fileplan. 

Not every organisation will take on SharePoint 2007. Of those that do, not every implementation will be successful or sustained.  SharePoint will face competition, but on a global scale that competition is unlikely to come from the niche vendors who provide EDRM and ECM systems based around TNA 2002 and MoReq/MoReq2.  The organisation in the best position to take on Microsoft and SharePoint is Google:  another huge, cash-rich monopoly.  Google plans to skirt around Microsoft's monopoloy of organisational servers and destops by providing their Google Apps system across the web, from the cloud.

The records management profession is going to have to get used to managing records in records systems that are not of its professional making.

The strength of SharePoint 2007 in the marketplace gives us as a profession no choice but to engage with it.   We need to be in a position to ensure that organisations make decisions in relation to SharePoint with their eyes open.   When organisations do choose to implement SharePoint team collaboration sites we need to be able to help teams make the best of them.   On a broader front, as a profession, we need to assess how we move forward in a post-SharePoint 2007 world, where our records management standards and specifications will have a reduced influence on the marketplace.

Below are what I consider be the key questions that we need to address in each of these areas 

Helping organisations make informed decisions in relation to SharePoint

• Given that SharePoint 2007 has no place to hold a hierarchical corporate fileplan how do we ensure the overall coherence of the collection of collaboration sites?

• How do we guard against the danger of 'SharePoint sprawl'? 

• How do we apply retention schedules in SharePoint?  How do we protect records from amendment or deletion?  Is it worth using the SharePoint 2007 Records Centre for these purposes?

• To what extent should we encourage/require the use of version control and metadata in SharePoint? 

• Do we recommend that organisations turn on the facility to allow each member of staff to have a 'my site'?  Individuals can use their my site to share information about themselves; to blog; and to create, store and (if they wish) share documents

• Do we recommend that organisations plug in TNA 2002/MoReq 2 based EDRM/ECM systems behind SharePoint?  If so how do we recommend that they map from the elements of SharePoint (site collection, site, library, folder or content type, document) to the elements of EDRM (fileplan heading, folder, document) 

• SharePoint offers many alternatives to documents and e-mails for creating and communicating information (wikis, blogs, discussion forums etc.)  Do we need to manage them?  If so how?    

• There are usually other drivers beside records management behind a SharePoint implementation.  How can we best ensure that records management and governance needs are afforded sufficient priority?  

• What do we do when we find SharePoint team collaboration sites being rolled out in competition with an existing or planned electronic records management system?

 

Helping teams and end-users make the best of SharePoint

• What advice and support do we need to provide end users to help them set up and manage SharePoint team collaboration sites?  

• What should we be advising each team to do when they start a new project or piece of work? Should they create a new team collaboration sub-site? or a new document library within an existing site/sub-site?  or a new folder within an existing document library? 

• Should we advise end users to use folders to organise their document libraries or 'content types' (metadata)?   

• Do SharePoint team collaboration sites help with managing e-mails?  

  

Moving forward as a profession

• SharePoint 2007 blurs the distinction between the intranet and the team working space.  It blurs the distinction between data and documents. How will this affect the relationships and distinctions between records managers and other professionals?  

• Where next for the business classification/corporate fileplan?  The international records management standard is based around it.   So are TNA 2002 and MoReq2. But they are difficult and time consuming to build and have had a mixed reception with users in those organisations that have built them.  SharePoint doesn't cater for them without work-arounds and customisation.  

• Where next for electronic records management specifications? When there were lots of niche vendors in the field, and when electronic records management systems (EDRM) were distinct from other types of system such as web/intranet content management systems then specifications worked well as a way of influencing the market.  Now EDRM systems have been subsumed into broader Enterprise Content Management (ECM)  systems, organisations are basing their procurement choices on a broader range of criteria.  And Microsoft have been able to ignore the specifications but still dominate this market.

James Lappin
Senior Associate consultant

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!

Why cloud computing is the biggest challenge Microsoft has ever faced, and what cloud computing means for your organisation

Like any traditional software vendor a significant slice of Microsoft's revenue comes when customers upgrade to a new version of its products.  The downside of this model is that upgrades cause uncertainty, disruption and expense to customer organisations.  

Microsoft has started to face serious competition from cloud computing:  Software-as-a-Service vendors who do not require customers to install their software on their servers. Instead the vendor hosts the system and customers pay a monthly subscription to use it via the web.  Microsoft's key competitors from the cloud include Google apps and Zoho.

Software-as-a-Service vendors do not usually require customers to upgrade to new versions of their software, instead improvements are made incrementally and included in the subscription fee.  The reason for this is that Software-as-a-Service vendors bear the burden of hosting each of their customers' implementations of their product.  If different customers are on different versions it adds complexity to this hosting and erodes their economies of scale.

The prospect of impending upgrades casts a shadow over the three main products that Microsoft sells into enterprises: Windows, Office, and SharePoint.

Windows 

Windows is suffering from a widespread reluctance of organisations to upgrade from Windows XP to Vista.   Organisations perceive that they can do most of what they need to do with XP, and that Vista does not offer significant advantages. Adoption was also hit by economic conditions.  Many buyers take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to new releases of Microsoft products.  By the time Vista had settled down the credit crunch was upon us and buyers saw sticking with XP for another year as a way of saving cash.   Many organisations will now be tempted to skip Vista entirely and wait until Windows 7 comes out. Gartner and Microsoft have both warned against this strategy:

• Gartner said that failing to upgrade to Vista is risky:  organisations skipping Vista may later find themselves with no option but to upgrade to Windows 7 shortly after its release because support for Windows XP is withdrawn. 
• Microsoft says that Windows 7 will be based upon Vista, and upgrading to it from XP will be significantly more complicated than upgrade from Vista.  

Organisations might call Microsoft's bluff on this one: E-week's Microsoft-watch blog reported in this post that  only 10% of enterprises have upgraded to Vista. Microsoft has already bowed to pressure to extend the life of XP, and it is not in the company's interests to make life  too difficult its customers. 

The Office Suite 

The productivity tools contained in the Office Suite no longer offers  Microsoft a competitive advantage. The establishment of standards for word processing tools has meant that it is too easy for competitors to provide software that imitates and interoperates with Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

MS Word documents can be viewed and edited in rival packages such as Google Docs, Open Office and Pages (Apple's equivalent for the Mac). I have bought an Asus ee netbook  and a Macbook over the past year and a half, neither had Office on it.  I have only missed it when colleagues provide me documents that contain macros written in Word.  

Of these alternative packages Google Docs is the strongest competitor.  It is free to individuals (which gets lots of people accustomed to using it).  It also forms the basis of Google Apps:  the system that Google offers to organisations from the cloud in competition with Office and SharePoint.

The main hope for Office lies in making it linking it ever more closely with the one great success of Microsoft's year, SharePoint.   The next version of Office (Microsoft Office 14) will be very tightly wrapped in with the next version of SharePoint.

The dilemma for Microsoft is that to differentiate the Office Suite from their free/cheap competitors they have to make it more sophisticated, but the increased sophistication increases the disruption and cost of upgrade to organisations because it introduces a need to provide training.  The upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2007 was the first Office upgrade in my memory that was radical enough for organisations to need to roll out training to accompany it.

SharePoint

The latest version of SharePoint, MOSS 2007 has been a roaring commercial success.  It has seen massive take up for by organisations using it for their web sites, intranet, collaboration and document management.  It has also been adopted by organisations wanting to introduce web 2 features such as blogs and wikis into the enterprises, despite the fact that these features are not particularly powerful in MOSS 2007.  

  
One of CMS watch's 12 technology predictions for 2009 is that the release of Office 14 will cast a shadow over SharePoint during 2009.  The next version of SharePoint is due to be released at the end of 2009/start of 2010,  coinciding with Office 14.  It will be significantly different to the current version of SharePoint, to enable its tight integration with Office 14.  CMS watch predicts that organisations will be wary of doing extensive customisation of their SharePoint implementation for fear of the work involved in upgrading it to the next version.  

Those organisations that adopted SharePoint 2003 are finding it far from straightforward to upgrade and migrate content to MOSS 2007, because MOSS 2007 was such a radical change. If the same pattern of a radical rather than an incremental upgrade occurs at the end of 2009 then Microsoft again runs a risk of alienating customers.

The implications of cloud computing for Microsoft 

Microsoft is unbeatable at providing traditional host-it-yourself software for organisations, because of:

• their large salesforce 
• their long-standing relations with IT departments 
• the investment that organisations have already made in the Windows platform and the software that Microsoft provide for it

The move of organisations to cloud computing is not in Microsoft interests.

• It erodes the competitive advantage they have from their provision of Windows 
• it levels the playing field for competitors wanting to sell into the enterprise. 
• it plays to the strengths of rivals such as Google whose products were developed from the start to be provided from the cloud. 

This post from Paul Miller describes the commercial and technological difficulties that SAP had in translating their hugely successful Enterprise Resource Planning software into an offering from the cloud.  The business model for providing systems from the cloud is fundamentally different from the model for providing systems for organisations to install on their servers.  The move to the cloud will be the hardest challenge Microsoft has ever faced.

The strongest indicator I have seen that the move to cloud computing is inevitable is the fact that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect is now basing his entire long term strategy on moving Microsoft's offerings to the cloud (see this full length article from Wired.com) 

The implications of cloud computing for organisations

The initial driver for organisations to migrate to cloud computing will be economic. Traditional software requires a substantial up front investment in licences, servers, integration, configuration, training and roll-out. These spikes of investment of time and resorces are repeated (albeit to a lesser extent) for every upgrade.

One of the first categories of organisation to adopt Software-as-a-Service were start-ups, partly because they had not already sunk investment into server rooms and IT staff, but also because they find it hard to acquire credit, and therefore the steady monthly subscription to a Software-as-a-Service vendor was more feasible to finance than the big up-front investment for traditional host-it-yourself software.

We are now in a credit crunch.   Most organisations are finding it hard to find cash for investment.   The smooth monthly subscription model of Software-as-a-Service is becoming more attractive.

Software provided from the cloud os different in character to the software that vendors have provided you on disks to install on your servers. It is simpler and leaner. The vendor bears the cost of hosting it so it is in their interests to cut out extraneous bloatage. Google apps is a far less complex product than SharePoint.  Whether this lack of complexity is a good thing or a bad thing depends partly on whether you see training colleagues on how to use their information systems as a benefit or a cost to your organisation. 

Cloud computing will erode the boundaries between the information systems of different organisations

Most teams in any organisation have as much need to collaborate with people outside the organisation as they do with people inside the organisation.   Any collaboration system that is confined to your organisation will by definition meet no more than half of a team's information needs and communication needs.   As soon as you stick a piece of software on your servers, customise it to your needs and wrap a firewall around it you are cutting that system off from the rest of the world.

At one time organisations aspired to have one corporate repository, organised with a corporate classification.  This dream is dying.  In the document and records management sphere corporate fileplans have failed. Organisations have not been able to get these corporate classifications accepted and used by staff.  Where organisations are using them staff do not find them useful.  A software package (SharePoint), that has no place for a corporate fileplan, has swept the board.

Cloud computing will  diminish the technical barriers to information collaboration between different organisations. Different organisations subscribing to the same Software-as-a-Service will be on the same version of the software and differences between the systems will be minimal.   

Myself and my colleagues in the TFPL consulting team all have Windows, Office and SharePoint on our desktops.  Maybe you do too, but what versions do you have? We have XP, Office 2003 and MOSS 2007.  Contrast this is with an  example of Software-as-a-Service. I use Google docs, the basis of Google Apps. Maybe you do too.  I don't need to ask you which version, there is only one version, and if I want to collaborate with you all I have to do is to send an invite to your username (in this case your googlemail address).

Imagine,  in the very near future,  several different organisations are signed up for a similar Software-as-a-Service for their generic collaborative software.  It might be Google Apps, it might be Zoho, it might even be SharePoint if  Microsoft managed to get it working well from the cloud, it might be AN Other system.   It will be trivially easy for a team inside one of those organisation to add in external partners to their collaboration sites. Not just technically possible for system administrators- trivially easy for end users. Once this happens there will be no going back to the days of server- installed, firewall encircled collaboration software, because going back would mean the organisation is cutting itself off from its customers and partners.