In the last few years SharePoint has taken the world by storm. In fact, the product is one of the fastest growing products in the history of Microsoft. Companies of all sizes are rapidly implementing SharePoint and moving it to the center of their organization. The interesting thing about SharePoint, however, is that if you ask ten different people what it is, they will probably give you ten different answers. The reason is because SharePoint has become a platform with many different capabilities. Sure, it has document management — but it also includes features that span everything from business intelligence to electronic form management. With so much functionality, used in so many different ways, no wonder people think of so many different things when they think of SharePoint.

Having been a consultant for more than a decade, I can attest to the fact that every organization is different. The differences in organizations span everything from culture nuances to product-development cycles and everything in between. As a result, every organization implements and uses SharePoint in a way that makes sense within its own walls. Implementing SharePoint would be much easier if every organization could be shoehorned into the same little box. But every organization different — so too is the way every organization adopts SharePoint. To make matters worse SharePoint is dynamic. The needs of an organization are constantly shifting; the way SharePoint is used shifts as well. At first, you might want to use SharePoint as a portal to the company intranet (or, for that matter, to the Internet) and to manage your electronic content. As the portal is adopted, however, you might decide that you need to adopt a business-intelligence strategy. After you put your BI strategy is in place, integrating your backend Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system with SharePoint might become a priority as well.

If working with SharePoint were as simple as installing the product and watching it solve problems, then consultants like me would be out of a job. SharePoint is an extensive platform and requires development at nearly every junction. The good news is that SharePoint redefines the term “developer.” A SharePoint developer is no longer only the computer science guru who spends time sorting through bits and bytes, looking at line after line of computer code in hopes of enlightenment (or “optimizing a complex algorithm,” if you will). The SharePoint platform is designed with the end user in mind — and provides tools that anyone can use to develop a SharePoint solution.