Why Can’t We Just Use SharePoint^®?

Scott Ryser

U.S. Business generates ten billion documents every year. Then we spend a third of our careers trying to find, manage and share all that stuff. Knowledge management software seems like the logical answer and there's no shortage of choices in this category. So why the huge failure rate?

Everything boils down to scalability, usability, and security

Thousands of products from hundreds of unlikely vendors (IBM and facebook are two polar opposites that come to mind) address every last detail of finding, organizing, creating, sharing and modifying information. There’s no universally accepted definition for “knowledge management,” and the choices are so vast that it’s tempting to default to SharePoint, the ubiquitous offering from Microsoft. Sometimes that’s the right decision. Sometimes it isn’t. How do you know?

Only three attributes determine the success (or failure) of any KM initiative. Don’t waste time or money on any software until you know how well it meets your specific needs for 1.) scalability, 2.) usability, and 
3.) security. High marks in one or two areas aren’t enough. You need all three.

Plan ahead. You don't want to do this twice

Most companies delay KM until they’re all but buried under Important Stuff. Then they face a dilemma. Choose fully customized, soup-to-nuts enterprise software with plenty of run room (and months or years of implementation time)? Or opt for workgroup collaboration they can drop into place right away?

Microsoft claims that SharePoint does both. In practice, though, we’ve found that while SharePoint is highly effective for workgroup collaboration, it has real limitations when rolled out across the enterprise.

What are those limitations? First, SharePoint’s search function doesn’t perform well in large deployments. Second, as content volume grows, so does user frustration: under SharePoint’s organizational structure, unless you already have a general idea of how an item’s categorized, you can’t find it at all. Finally, SharePoint access control is tied to places rather than individual content items, so security is tough to manage and administer on a large scale.

Even if none of this matters to you at first, it will. Because once your organization gets a taste of KM, you’ll find there’s a natural, constant push to expand its reach. If your system can’t scale to meet the demand, be prepared to replace it much sooner than you expect.

WHEN YOUR ORGANIZATION GETS A TASTE OF WHAT’S POSSIBLE WITH KM, 
THERE WILL BE PRESSURE TO EXPAND. IF YOUR SYSTEM CAN’T SCALE, YOU’LL REPLACE IT FAR SOONER THAN YOU EXPECT.

Don’t pay per-seat license fees

Quick adoption is what you want. That’s where the real KM benefits—productivity, cost/benefit paybacks, quicker decisions—kick in. But be forewarned: by definition, per-seat license fees discourage viral adoption.

Per-seat pricing is has been the standard for so long in the software industry that it’s easy to take for granted. But this is a self-defeating model for collaborative software, which cannot succeed until it gathers critical mass. Beware of contracts that up the ante when you add users beyond the hosting workgroup. Your best bet is an all-inclusive enterprise license that covers search capabilities, multiple web sites across divisions, and other 
add-ons without additional fees.

Users rule

If KM is counterintuitive right out of the gate, most users won’t give it a second chance. Despite this, traditional providers—Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Big Three consultants—still write code the old way: technology first, user experience second. The developers control everything from workflow to font colors and expect the users adapt.

As I mentioned earlier, SharePoint’s destination-based navigation ties content to a place. Unless you know how the content publisher organized the stuff you’re looking for, you won’t find it—and you won’t get the benefit of any related material, either. Information accumulates in stovepipes, making cross-enterprise collaboration increasingly difficult 
over time.

Quit hunting for information. Let it find you.

The Yakabox™ neatly eliminates this problem. You don’t hunt for information, it finds you. The software trolls continuously for relevant material based on each user’s interests and preferences and delivers it to the desktop to review at a glance. If you choose, you can take action on it right there—there’s no need to go someplace else. You have instant access to the stuff that matters, including all those nuggets related to it that you didn’t know existed.

Does the system support your security policy?

KM obviously adds another layer to the already complex task of data security management. Every system you evaluate will have its own approach to access control and content protection, each with its own set of tradeoffs. It’s crucial to assess up front how well each system balances risk versus usability in your particular environment.

In compliance-driven operations—government, health care, finance—beefing up the security architecture of a one-size-fits-all system is not efficient. Don’t spend time and money retrofitting.

SHAREPOINT’S USABILITY LIES IN FAMILIARITY RATHER THAN SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE. 
THAT’S NOT A BAD THING 
UNTIL YOU’RE READY TO WRING MORE OUT OF THE APPLICATION—AND YOU CAN’T.

You’re better off with a KM system built specifically for security-intensive environments: they carry a lower cost of ownership and perform better over the long haul.

Even simple architecture decisions have a disproportionate impact on a KM system’s usability, primarily because this is not an occasional application: KM is right at the core of most users’ daily activities. Take permission settings, for example. Since SharePoint only allows permission settings at the place level, users may be denied access to items they do have rights to in the same location. In this case, security trumps usability simply because it’s easier for the developer. That’s not only a pain in the neck, but could be avoided without compromising the safety of the data.

The Yakabox™ takes a different approach. You can set content permissions right down to the individual item, and the publisher controls who sees what. If you’re not allowed to view it, it simply doesn’t show up. You still retain access to other items you’re permitted to see in that location. (For even further fine-tuning, the Yakabox™ gives publishers the power to establish need-to-know and scope-of-sharing restrictions.)

SHAREPOINT’S BROAD-BRUSH APPROACH TO SECURITY IS AWKWARD IN BIG DEPLOYMENTS, WHERE PERMISSION DECISIONS ARE MORE NUMEROUS AND MORE COMPLEX.

Keep in mind that if your organization is publicly held, highly regulated, and/or subject to third-party audits, the software you choose may be subject to industry-specific data security standards. This may include HIPAA (health care), PL3 plus Annex E accreditation (government), Gramm Leach Bliley/Sarbanes-Oxley (financial services) and a host of others. Check each software vendor’s industry credentials before you get too far along in the evaluation cycle.

Black box customization is giving way to power users

KM customization is a fact of life for most enterprise deployments. And like everything else, you have a choice. You can do it the easy way...or the hard way.

Bad news first. It’s hard to customize SharePoint beyond a certain level. If you want more than the software can provide right out of the box, look elsewhere: Microsoft isn’t going to customize its core for anybody, and some key functions for enterprise deployment simply can’t be incorporated into the platform.

The good news is that there’s an easier way. Yakabox™ power users configure many of their own mods.

They get precisely what they want, and “it’s faster, better and cheaper than doing it the old way,” says a U.S. Intelligence Community project leader. His team is building an internal application on the Yakabox™ for half what it would cost using SharePoint.

Extensive modifications, including those at the core, are readily available through the Yakabod professional services group. Yakabod uses Agile development—a series of closely-spaced, iterative deliverables—to get software into the hands of users quickly. Customizations that require months or years on other systems can be turned around in weeks on the Yakabox™.

So why can’t we just use SharePoint?

You can.

SharePoint is a solid choice for workgroup collaboration. Many Yakabod clients are former SharePoint users, and Yakabox™ 3.0 connects directly to SharePoint. (Relevant information flows right to the Activity Viewer on the user’s desktop.)

In a nutshell, SharePoint is engineered to help your team work together. The Yakabox™ is engineered to help your team work together and across the enterprise. Evaluate each system (and any others you’re considering) based on how well it matches your specific requirements for scalability, usability and security. And plan ahead. You really don’t want to do this twice.