It seems like Microsoft is on a roll with SharePoint. Organisations are casting out their old web content platforms and moving onto it in droves.

Anyone who has had to implement, work with or evaluate the product against the competition knows that this is not necessarily indicative of it being the perfect product.

However, the Microsoft sales team should clearly be applauded, along with Microsoft’s rather lacklustre enterprise competitors and a feeding frenzy of consultants.

Total cost of ownership

The most quoted benefit of SharePoint is the low per user license fee and ability to only train users on one consistent user experience.

For medium sized businesses, and even many large organisations though — these benefits are not enough to cover the flaws related to total cost of ownership, the need to acquire many add-ons solutions and the lack of usability against peers in any specific area of functionality.

In terms of cost, the 2012 SharePoint Census told us that per-user costs over and above licensing were up to US$48.47.

The general track record is that there is $8 spent for every $1 in license fees from Microsoft.

Whilst Office365 reduces support costs for service management technical resources, it does not remove the need for SharePoint specialists to support and manage features.

Feature quality

Everything is reduced to a web component, a list and actions on a list. It all feels horribly like the days when everyone built applications in Microsoft Access databases to run their business — only this time, hurrah, it’s on a web browser. In fact, you can import your access database in SharePoint if you want.

Compounding this problem is Microsoft’s addiction to tick the box approach to product development. Any evaluation of any specific out-of-the-box feature would place it near the bottom of it’s best of breed competitors.

Take their Wiki. If you compare it head to head against an Atlassian Confluence it is like comparing a sleek SUV with a old rickshaw. The same is true of task management, file synchronisation, team collaboration and just about every other so-called app that they offer.

The all-you-can-eat sales story is attractive for executives and IT Architects. Only after they have committed to Microsoft and start hunting around for users to they discover they need to start ramping up custom development and buying additional solutions to satisfy the needs of the business.

Eventually we all know they will end up with a very expensive, monolithic application environment.

The future legacy software that we will all spend lot’s of time decommissioning. Anyone who has seen what happened to Lotus Notes knows how this ends.

The success of mobile platform app stores have demonstrated that unique user experiences are much more important than homogeneity. Users have no problem adapting to innovative and different ways of working across their preferred applications.

If your organisations presumes to force feed staff a diet of sameness, I suspect they will start to lose out to competitors taking advantage of a thriving ecosystem of applications whose owners are too passionate about a great user experience to build upon the SharePoint platform.

What will it take to fix Microsoft SharePoint?

Without being religious I think that SharePoint in its current form needs to go on a very big diet. Perhaps even be sent to the product grave yard.

In it’s place Microsoft has the opportunity to build a best in class email platform, identity, document storage service and social graph that can be utilised individually or as a group.

Suddenly customers will start seeing other enterprise applications, regardless of platform offering these Microsoft services on any platform and in any context. Developers will be free to tailor their application to the unique context of the job their users are trying to do.

The new leadership at Microsoft appear to recognise this and are opening out to new platforms and heavily investing in the services and API’s around Office365 and Azure.

It is clear the new guard recognise the threat of other players becoming the dominant integration partner of all leading best of breed applications.

Rather than force companies to build within SharePoint, the future will be Microsoft embedding it’s core services everywhere.

This will likely be the future. My view — don’t waste money on the past.