SharePoint: The Back Door Storage Play

We've been a SharePoint user, of sorts anyway, since the original beta. I didn't think much of it, to be honest, as eventually it became a giant pain in the rump just like every other tree oriented file system – once you put a zillion things in it, and you can't find anything.

Anyhow, about 18 months ago it came to my attention that part of the problem was we were still on the beta code and weren't using any of the things that SharePoint something more interesting than a NAS share. So I started looking into the nice little Microsoft stuff, and was pretty blown away by the theory of all that could be with SharePoint. We decided to keep up with the times and get our act together, implement a modern version, stop using the free "services" and go with the full blown server version, and spend the necessary time to architect and manage the stuff the way it should be.

At this same time, I reached out to some mucky muck MS executives I know and let them in on the fact that their favorite loudmouth analyst firm was a Lotus Notes shop. Notes has been fine for us, but it did require us to use a little teeny little company's CRM tool that no one ever heard of, and that has been less than supportable by people not interested in supporting CRM applications. I figured it was time to succumb to the inevitable Microsoft integration story, and fight my battles elsewhere.

Surprisingly (to me, perhaps not any of you), a year and a half later, and I still haven't made the switch. We have held our SharePoint world together with duct tape and ear wax, managed to (very legally) get all of our people up to some semblance of the same level of Office 2003, and slowly planned how to get into the Exchange world. I will share all the sorid details of this later – but I figured little ESG was the perfect test case for someone like mighty Microsoft – a small business who wanted to buy into the whole MS enchilada, and just needed a little help to get there. In 18 months, I couldn't find a single MS VAR that knew what they were doing. Not one. Some knew some things, and others others, (some Office 2007 – which is awesome, even though it's a rip off if you ask me – and some Exchange, no one but one really good consultant from Vermont who knows SharePoint), but nary a one could put the whole thing together. Hell, I can't even find someone who can understand how to license half this stuff. (Note: I swear I'm trying to be legal!). It's infuriating. More on that later.

What we did figure out is that SharePoint is way cool. You can find anything anywhere, you can create automated workflows for collaboration and if you actually care about boring things like finding a PowerPoint slide – which I do, because my pathetic life is based on 11,000,000 of them – then SharePoint is an awesome tool. We are inches away from releasing a whole new set of capabilities because of it. While we were figuring all that out, a thought came to me. This is how Microsoft is going to steal the "storage intelligence" business. Sure they sell Storage Server 2003 R2 (crafty naming, btw) as a low-end NAS OEM offering, but it has had no real success as an enterprise caliber system. The don't play in the archive or corporate search markets. They aren't really a security play except on the bad end normally. So I think MS is doing something really smart – they aren't calling SharePoint a storage server, or a data intelligence server, or anything outside of a "collaboration" tool – but it is.

SharePoint lets you create and store unstructured data, apply security and rights management to that data, apply retention times to that data, and lots of other interesting things – and keeps it all inside a database. Even better, you don't know it's inside a database – you don't have to manage the database. It combines the best of both worlds, in one neat little package. I don't know if they are that sinister, at least by design, but let's give them credit where credit is due – if you are not able to have your way in a market by beating others at their own game, change the game.

So, if you happen to be in the NAS, archiving, discovery, retention, collaboration, security, or data management space – you might want to start considering SharePoint as a threat instead of as just another application to play with. Call me paranoid, but sometimes it seems like those Redmond folks aren't as nice as they seem……..

Comments

[Natalie]

Hi Steve- I have been using SP2K7 and fully agree it is a storage system/document vault and have found that when you expect more than that it may be a little frustrating. It is not billed as a storage system and many people seem not to realize it is about having more administrative options. Most of the action takes place behind the scenes with the database. As more firms implement their upgrades, I am certain we will see the user experience improve with a growing development environment. Telepresence along with a budding direction in social enterprise initiatives (facebook)will be very interesting.

[bob]

hey steve - whose back door is it? and whose storage play is it? like you say, at the end of the day sharepoint is a collaborative tool with integration in MSFT products, right? - it may be more powerful in the 2007 version, but its still collaboration...so how do storage vendors tap into this? is sharepoint's "unstructured data db" (oxymoron) accessible to anyone but MSFT?

-----Nope, you will not be playing with the SharePoint backend - which is sort of why this is so interesting to me. The SharePoint store might be on a NAS system or a block device, but users won't ever see it - they will be writing to a SharePoint site. The threat is in the intelligence possibilities within SharePoint itself - single instancing, security, meta-data attributes, search, and so on. Backing up, managing, and harnessing the information will be the value on top that folks need to be thinking about. What they are doing is really saying "hey, don't use NAS, use SharePoint, because of all the invisible structured dbase things it brings to the table - and that's what infrastructure guys need to be cognizant of.-----Steve