LDS & Microsoft SharePoint^®

Microsoft SharePoint^® has taken root as a wildly popular platform in many enterprises. Virtually all organizations we work with today are using SharePoint in some manner, and the outliers are still giving it a hard look. A rich set of features and configurability endear SharePoint to IT departments, while business stakeholders continue to be drawn to SharePoint’s consumer-grade user experience capabilities and web content management. SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) and the new SharePoint 2010 are powerful platforms that can support Internet-facing sites, enterprise portals, and more narrowly, collaboration or Line of Business portals. Some of our clients are on their second-generation of SharePoint-based enterprise portals and are evaluating SharePoint Online or other cloud computing offerings, while others are getting their feet wet with SharePoint as a workgroup and content management tool.

Fundamentally, we believe SharePoint is well suited to perform in many platform roles, contributing valuable capabilities to online platform foundations. We believe it is key to identify what SharePoint's role will be in the organization and focus the attention of project resources accordingly. We see four deployment patterns emerging:

• SharePoint as a vertical portal
• SharePoint as an enterprise portal
• SharePoint as a loosely-related collaboration platform
• SharePoint as a tightly-integrated collaboration platform.