Giving SharePoint a Longer Tail of Solutions

All three sections of this version of the SharePoint tail can and will increase. You'd have to figure that in the years ahead Microsoft will add more workloads to out of the box SharePoint thus delivering more generic solutions to customers. Allied to this, the success and popularity of the platform makes it very likely that ISV's will continue to emerge with innovative solutions that add to the value of the SharePoint platform. However these first two sections are limited in their expansion by comparison to the third section. Even though Microsoft's annual R&D budget is greater than the debt of some small nations it is still finite. There is only so much the SharePoint team can develop in each release and the SharePoint platform has to appeal to a broad community. The SharePoint team cannot afford to build for thousands of small niches.

So the real potential to increase the number of solutions available on the SharePoint platform is with the third section of the tail - the customer. I am reminded of the story that I first read in James Martin's book on 4GL's (4th Generation Languages) in the mid 1980's. He told the story of how analysts forecast that there would only ever be a market for 2M cars as only 2M people in the world would be willing to be chauffeurs. Of course Henry Ford builds the Model T and everyone could drive so there are now way more than 2M cars on the road. James Martin was applying the analogy to computer languages where 4GL's were designed to make it very easy for people drive / program their own computers. I imagine if James Martin was to update his Volume II (citing representative 4th generation languages) then he'd add SharePoint! SharePoint makes it really easy to build business solutions but most of them are one-off's and never see the light of day outside of their own organizations.

So what can we do to make the SharePoint tail of solutions even longer?

(1) Democratise production - make it very easy for all (especially the "amateurs") to produce and maintain the solutions

• The Microsoft SharePoint Development Team
  • I know there is lots of pressure on the SharePoint team to build more functionality into the existing workloads (e.g. content management, document management, etc.) to make them even easier for us to use them out of the box with even less coding. I am sure there is also pressure to make more of the platform accessible to non-programmers in the style in which most of the platform is available today. Personally I think Microsoft are doing an awesome job on the first of the three factors as expressed by Chris Anderson - "Democratise production - make it very easy for all (especially the "amateurs") to produce the solutions". So what else can Microsoft do over and above what they are already doing?
  • You might notice that I added the words "and maintain" to the first of the three Long Tail factors. You see when creating music or books they are a one-off. You do not have to update the customer copies. When you bring out a 2nd edition book it is really a brand new product. This is not so with software. When we get next versions we expect to be able to update our existing versions. Today Microsoft will ship new version of the SharePoint platform that allow you update the version you are running but there is no way (yet) to update deployed solutions you have built yourself. In some ways the solutions are seen as content in SharePoint. I see this as my number one type of capability that I'd like to vote for in the "Democratise production" category to help lengthen the tail.
  • When customers build solutions on SharePoint they build the functionality into lists, web-parts, features, etc. that get deployed across many sites, site collections and even server farms. There is then no easy way to make a change in one or more parts of the solution and have it deployed across all the places it is deployed. Many customers are really only beginning to build solutions that are deployed widely, so have not yet encountered this challenge. This capability would save customers so much time and it would encourage them to spend more time working on building out and evolving the solution as they would then see it as a true reusable solution. They would look on the solutions differently, as more reusable solutions than content. It is a hard nut to crack for the SharePoint team but it would make it easier for customers to update solutions and also to transport and share solutions. This would get the solutions out of the organizations that built them and sharable across many more organizations.

• ISV’s
  • A question for the reader … What do you think this part of the community can do to "Democratise production"?

• Customers and Microsoft System Integrator Partners
• A question for the reader … What do you think this part of the community can do to "Democratise production"?

(2) Democratise distribution - make the multitude of new products very available

• The Microsoft SharePoint Business Team
  • There is a need for a dynamic and yet good Microsoft sponsored catalogue of available and reusable solutions. A one stop shop for all solutions - free and paid for - hosted and on-premise. Clearly this is a job for a SharePoint portal! I do not mean SharePoint portal in the older SharePoint 2003 narrow sense, but rather a "Web 2.0" / fully socially networked SharePoint portal. This catalogue would really stretch SharePoint but what a great example it would be of a great use of SharePoint. Again it is not an easy job but it would be so worth it. Customers and partners could find solutions that they could reuse. I know the SharePoint community and I know this to be a community that would share.

• ISV’s
  • A question for the reader … What do you think this part of the community can do to "Democratise distribution"?

• Customers and Microsoft System Integrator Partners
  • A question for the reader … What do you think this part of the community can do to "Democratise distribution"?

(3) Tap consumer sentiment so that to connect the demand to the new supply

• The Microsoft SharePoint Business Team
  • As you can imagine there would be lots of rubbish in this solution portal but all long tails have rubbish in them. However if the portal were setup well then consumers of the solutions would be able to rate the solutions they had evaluated or deployed. Some would have positive reviews and some very negative reviews. Some would be so popular that consumers would take and improve them and hand them back better. Then because we had the "update facility" talked of in Factor 1 above, the other users of these solutions would be able to take the good new pieces and deploy them to their solutions. There is always lots of crap in the long tail - so what! The filters and recommendations would allow us find the good stuff. The good stuff like the cream would rise to the top.

• ISV’s
  • A question for the reader … What do you think this part of the community can do to "Connect Demand to the new Supply"?

• Customers and Microsoft System Integrator Partners
  • A question for the reader … What do you think this part of the community can do to "Connect Demand to the new Supply"?

So in summary what I'd love to see Microsoft to do in the next few years is to:

1. make it possible to continually update deployed solutions in SharePoint (that today is seen as content)
2. create a world class dynamic catalogue of SharePoint solutions where the solution can be found and downloaded
3. facilitate the building of a true community around the catalogue of solutions

Call for Discussion

As I said above, please consider this a conversation opener and not a white paper with definitive and fixed ideas. I'd love your feedback through the blog please! There are some specific questions posed above but I am sure you have feedback on other aspects of the blog entry aside from the specific questions asked. Also if you want to email me directly on this topic then please do so using the Contact button on the top of the page.