SharePoint’s biggest competitor
SharePoint’s biggest competitor is its own product sibling—the Microsoft Office Suite.
Office’s success means there is no real need for SharePoint.
Yes, SharePoint can provide added benefits, but today’s office can run without it. Take away Outlook, Excel or Word, however, and what happens? Work grinds to a halt.
Take away SharePoint (but leave the other Office products), and people cope. They go back to the old way of doing things, saving their file on local drives or servers.
While Microsoft lists SharePoint Server as one of its Office products, it is not one of the base desktop products that most people recognise as the Microsoft Office suite.
Nowadays most people are familiar with email, word processors and spreadsheets. They learn about them at school. They know what each product does, and how. They are basic must-have tools to get by in today’s business and schools.
Try telling someone how important SharePoint is. What do you say? “It helps you collaborate with your team members.”
They say, “I collaborate anyway. We exchange emails all the time.”
You say, “Well, what about file sharing?”
They counter with, “I can use Windows Explorer to share files, and at least they’re still accessible when SharePoint is down.”
Ouch. Because you know everyone remembers the times SharePoint goes down and their documents are inaccessible.
Anything you say can be done via SharePoint can also be done in another Office program. Issue lists—you can do that in a spreadsheet. Tasks—you can do that in Outlook, if it’s your personal list, or a spreadsheet if it’s a group list. It seems you can’t win.
The thing is, these people are right. Excel spreadsheets and Outlook mail are good tools. Why bother with SharePoint when you already have something adequate for the job?
Comments (3 comments)
As much as the points mentioned about Office being SharePoint’s biggest competitor, how come users to this day complain that we need better tools to share, collaborate and communicate even when they have the latest Excel, Word or Email application in front of them… granted SharePoint web part technology can be done by the Office desktop applications but SharePoint’s trump card if you like is it’s ability and aim to bring together silo’d environments that use the desktop apps on a day to day basis, to work through a single interface, to be able to share content, collaborate on it in various ways and communicate more effectively with others..
Dovechic / August 2nd, 2007, 6:32 pm / #
I totally agree with you, Dovechic. Most people are creatures of habit, though, and resist change unless they’re the ones who implement it.
I should probably have include File Manager (Explore in Windows) as well as Office. For many people ’sharing’ documents means having access to the same folders.
CabSav / August 3rd, 2007, 7:42 pm / #
[…] And that’s how I look at SharePoint. I have talked about this on another site, how I believe that SharePoint’s biggest competitor is its own product siblings in the Microsoft Office suite. Nowadays not many people want to go back to pen and paper ledger books, but most people find that Excel, Word and Outlook, along with Windows file manager, are more than adequate for them to do their day-to-day work. They know these products, they have processes in place for working with documents. Processes that have been tweaked over the years so that they really work well. Why should they change? […]
Moss Lady » Blog Archive » But what does SharePoint do? / August 15th, 2007, 7:49 pm / #
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