Introduction

The global adoption of Microsoft SharePoint by organizations of all sizes means that in a book that is in other respects resolutely vendor neutral it is important to highlight the benefits and issues that arise when considering the use of SharePoint for an intranet. The core problem is that often there is no opportunity to consider the use of SharePoint because the decision has already been made by the IT department to implement it. The intranet manager is then faced with the decision of how best to make use of the situation.

This chapter does not attempt to provide a technical evaluation of either Microsoft SharePoint 2007 (often abbreviated to MOSS07) or Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (SP2010). A report from the Intranet Benchmarking Forum looks in detail at how SP2010 can be used for an intranet; there is also a report from the Forum on MOSS07.1 The Real Story Group offers a set of detailed evaluations of SharePoint and these are essential reading for any intranet manager who is unfamiliar with the product suite.

As the notional owners of the SharePoint application will be the IT department, and because SharePoint is a development platform, IT will almost certainly wish to take a lead in setting the implementation objectives and timetable. SharePoint is certainly a development platform, but it is equally a business delivery platform. The business has to set and assess the progress towards meeting clear business objectives. This is especially challenging with SharePoint because some departments may want to use just one functional area while others may require several areas to be developed in parallel and integrated together.

There is no doubt that good intranets can be built using MOSS07 or SP2010, and indeed some of the intranets described in the Nielsen Norman Annual Intranet Designreports2 do use MOSS07 as their platform. However, there are probably a much greater number of intranets where the move to a SharePoint application has not met expectations.3 This is almost always the result of: