SharePoint, its pros and cons

I came across an excellent article on sharepoint.

Sharepoint is a very popular tool in companies large and small. It is probably the standard answer when people ask about enterprise collaboration tool.

I came across several organizations where sharepoint was deployed. team members were encourage by their lead for using sharepoint portal for their daily collaboration. it normally goes like this -
"hey, we have the sharepoint team portal. you can join and upload your documents so that everyone can share."

"you know we should start the discussion on sharepoint to collect ideas on our applications"

"let's document this process on our team wiki site, so that everyone who need to know about it can find the answer themselves"

Contributing and sharing are the key aspect of social networking and would create a lot of values for the companies if people can all start doing so. However, easy said than done. There maybe 2-3% of population are the true contributors who are writing new posts or blogs and go that extra miles to express their views to the world, rest of us are just consumers, readers who read if there are interesting article but never or rarely express their own view in writing on the web.

These statistics probably explains why so many team portal site left unattended. People probably contribute some writing and document after initial setup but rarely update it with new information. Colleagues would stop coming to the portal knowing there would be very little update anyhow. There it goes a downward spiral with that chicken-egg problem.

Unless you make contributing to the team portal a part of first class citizen in daily tasks, people will always find something more interesting to do, such as searching for the best lunch place on google map.

There are a lot of use cases for sharepoint, however, I think it is not the best environment for knowledge sharing due to the above reasons. It has nothing to do with the technology. The features are there, people are not in any mood and incentive to do it.

I think a platform where it help people find information easily without them spending additional time managing those information will be key to a successful collaboration too. In fact, it is one of goals I tried to achieve with thinkj.com