A SharePoint Revelation; Maybe a Revolution?

Talk about your epiphany moments:

First, if you haven’t read Thomas Friedman’s latest updated revision of “The World is Flat,” I highly suggest you pick up a copy. The text illustrates a flattening of the global community by illustrating the leveling factors of politics and technology over the last 20 years. It is a truly insightful look at how we have moved into “an age of the individual.” This is a time when, based on technological advancements in the PC, the World Wide Web and telecommunications that any one person (the individual) can make an impact felt globally through digitization and mass communication.

As I was contemplating the astuteness and breadth of Mr. Friedman’s rationale, I was also separately doing some research on Microsoft’s advancement with their SharePoint platform. I was simply blown away by the scope of possibilities now available within this framework. Of course, there are a tremendous amount of blogs on the topic, but one of my favorites is Sahil Malik’s blah.WebSmarts page.

What I found (and I am far from the first) is that literally one person or a small group of savvy techs (not necessarily programmers, mind you) can utilize the framework of SharePoint to accomplish a wide array of business functions, up to and including application development.

With assistance from third-party providers like CorasWorks (Reston, Virginia), any size company, division, or department can literally compete on a global scale to provide the same advanced business functions, both internally and externally, as Fortune 100s.

The use of a SharePoint platform to develop functions and applications visually and without thousands of coding man-hours is a huge “flattening” development. As SharePoint and third-party providers continue to expand upon these capabilities, more and more processes and innovations will stem from this leveled playing field.

To fully understand where I am coming from, I recommend the book and highly recommend looking into the “quiet” revolution Microsoft is putting together with SharePoint. As I am still grasping the capabilities of WSS and MOSS, I welcome readers’ comments and thoughts.

By the way, it is not lost on me that I am writing a blog enabled by technology to reach anyone in this “flattened” world.