Google Apps, SharePoint and this project

At the outset, let it be acknowledged that SharePoint is a great product. For good reason, many in the legal services community have either adopted or are at least seriously looking at SharePoint as a core component of their network infrastructure. A notable example of this trend from earlier this year is Tom Winter’s video collection of SharePoint Resources for Legal Aid. Impressive.

That said, observant followers of The Findability Project may have noticed our chronic inattention, and now outright de-emphasis of SharePoint. There’s a reason. Actually, several reasons.

When we submitted our TIG proposal in 2007, we proposed SharePoint as a key component of the technical specifications for this project. Once we received the grant in 2008, that is exactly how we proceeded as we put together our so-called blunt-instrument build. At the time, we put in place an open-source Google SharePoint connector that plays nicely with the Google Search Appliance (GSA). (We have documented how we configured the SharePoint side of things; we will eventually document how the Google connector configurations work.)

From the get-go we recognized the basic promise of SharePoint, i.e., it offers an array of enterprise platform options for creating and maintaining organizational portals and managing content. All stuff we wanted as we built out our project, moved toward positioning our content in very purposeful ways, and worked out optimal ways for our organization to communicate, share and find content. True, we were less sanguine about SharePoint’s enterprise search features. Not because it is not effective. It is. But we had greater confidence in the algorithms and effectiveness of Google enterprise search, which natively works with most everything Google, and SharePoint does not. But we will put that tribal view aside, for the moment. We give SharePoint its due: Impressive.

That was late 2007, early 2008. This is now, a little more than a year later. What happened in the interim? Google Apps happened … way more, way better Google Apps including an increasingly impressive array of collaboration features … including domain Google Sites … integration of Google Analytics into Google Apps … and then at the end of 2008 some serious happy with the version 5.2 update for the Google Search Appliance, which now integrates with Google Apps, including Google Sites.

Way impressive.

Even though we had SharePoint in place and could have built out our intranet using it, we all but immediately and instinctively moved on to Google Sites once it became available to us in 2008 and, in short order, built things out that way. (See Google Apps Redux for more about how LSNC currently uses Google Apps, including Google Sites.) It is not that SharePoint is not useful to accomplish many of the same things. It is. But at what cost and at what loss in usability?

For a modestly sized non-profit like ours (about 130 employees and two actual IT staff, not wannabees), the Google Apps platform has proven to be a phenomenal, secure, essentially zero-cost, zero-maintenance way to have access to pretty much all the basic collaborative and communication technologies now deemed baselines for the legal services community. (Oh, yeah, the baselines happened in 2008, also.)

And all this stuff works very nicely with the Google Search Appliance. SharePoint, not so much.