I read through the post and what appears to be glossed over is that organizations that installed SharePoint did in general a poor job of projecting how permissions and feature decisions would affect their information being “findable”. There’s nothing magic about this.

One of the big problems to making information “findable” is that business users trend toward wanting to “lock down their data” with permissions, which makes it only available to their workgroups. In some cases this is necessary (think HR), but in most cases it’s just silly. Then when the information can’t be found elsewhere in the organization, it’s IT and/or Microsoft’s fault. I saw this at a very large global company where I used to work and I’ve recently seen the potential for going down this same “old” road while doing a demo for an organization looking at SP for “Enterprise 2.0”. Allowing users to set their own permissons over who can see or not see data is going to lead to this type of partitioning.

What is not pointed out strongly enough is that the mentality of the old file shares and permission structure has been replicated in the design of the SharePoint implementations and so “Enterprise 2.0” can’t happen. The resulting hoopla and comments seem to be the usual “MS Hating” that is prevalent with IT organizations that don’t want to take the time to understand the technology, do the real requirements gathering, execute carefully monitored and evaluated pilots, and thoughtfully consider how it will look a year or two into the future. Some of the complaints are valid about IT not considering how end-users will want to use it, but I think it’s more about the earlier comment about poor requirements gathering and poorly executed pilots.

While it is clear that the Web 2.0 pieces of SharePoint cannot directly compete with products that have focused in this area (most wide suites also struggle here), with some careful consideration and planning it can get many enterprises moving along the way to Enterprise 2.0 with a suite to which they already have access. But with any suite in a 3.0 version, it’s going to take additional components to satisfy detailed requirements.

However, it still remains to be seen where E2.0 actually brings real measurable value to an enterprise and not just additional complexity, oversight,cost, and management.