RealSharePoint.com

I ran into an article this morning entitled "Independents Seize on Success of Microsoft's SharePoint". I had expected to see a comprehensive report on a state of the SharePoint partner ecosystem, which include a multitude of 3rd-party vendors that provide various solutions that enhance SharePoint functionality, or fill in certain gaps. What was interesting about this article was the focus on JSR 170 as a way for integrating SharePoint into legacy enterprise content repositories.

 

As I read through this article, I tried to think back and recall which one of the customers we've worked with have actually attempted this route of integrating SharePoint with other systems via standards. There aren't many. And this is not just JSR 170, but also other standards such as WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets). Yes, SharePoint has a WSRP Consumer Web Part, but I have never seen any organization use it heavily to access non .NET-based portlets. The fact of the matter is that everyone knows that standards only offer the least amount of capabiliities because of the wide range of vendor solutions that they need to support. Getting SharePoint to work with these standards has proven to be challenging, and the resulting application experience is typically less than desirable.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for standards, but they're just not quite there yet, and competition leads to vendors trying to one-up each other by providing even more innovative features via their proprietary technology stack, and that will benefit the end users regardless. The real question is does SharePoint really need to rely on these standards to be considered "enterprise ready"? Perhaps not.