The Ribbon: the things to come from MS SharePoint

What is SharePoint? I paused to think, well, it is not what is, but what it does, and what is does is creating an ubiquitous user experience across the Office world, which up until this day, rules the world.  Already announced, MS SharePoint will have one major change: the user experience (UE).  MSSP today provides a rather web-like experience, but MSSP 2010 will try to convey the Office world by borrowing some its user interface/experience.  The Ribbon, to be more precise.  Back in 2007, MS Office introduced the ribbon experience. Here is a brief summary: prior to the 2007 release, MS struggle to add and categorize commands and features, and as these were added, they were increasingly buried within an application menu system that was great for a limited set of features but which struggled to surface capabilities to users.   Over the years, the learning curve increased. So, Microsoft’s RD team  introduced the Ribbon, a contextual user interface, which surfaces features and functions depending upon the activity the user is engaged in.

The Ribbon comes to SharePoint as well.

“SharePoint 2010 promises an experience in reaching across the firewall to connect with partners and customers. With new features like personal password management, Office web applications, enhanced Web 2.0 features and more. Now your internal content creators can set aside concerns about HTML, PHP, and the like. They can confidently produce documentation in Office, publish it to SharePoint and know that their intended consumers of that content will be able to open it, and if they have appropriate permissions, even edit the content, all from a web browser.”

http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/Pages/videos.aspx

The Netoff: Drupal and SharePoint

Back in 1998, I got a job at CircuitCity (back when they were profitable) as an assistant manager.  The “MD” mini-disc was a big thing and a threat to the CD; that was my understanding.  It sounded good and it looked good, but best of all, the MD promised “skippless” play time.  So, I went and bought a Phillics 3200 MD player. In 1999, I started college at Art Center College of Design and by then the MD was becoming obsolete–the amount of hours I spent transferring my music library to those mini-discs was growing at the same rate my fear of the MD rolling out of the market kept growing.  The MD is no longer with us.

Lesson learned: don’t jumped on the rope so soon.

Over the last year, I have been in charge of implementing SharePoint in our office.  Due to the chaos our inadequate document management/workflow creates, I had to take on the task,  as I was also the one pushing for the implementation of SharePoint services in our network.  The goal analysis was to regain control of document management and work-flow of the office and was centered on the fact that boss had made Outlook his document library causing Outlook to fail at least once a month.

At the moment, I am finding out more about Drupal and how it used, who is using it, how they are using, and I am curious enough to start a pilot project. I have no idea how to start– all I know is that we are running on MS Server not Apache, so that could a problem.

Here is a little comparison of the key features/aspect between the two CMS.

Sharepoint has a better document management framework and it integrates with the MS world.
Drupal on the other hand, has a better grasp on managing users; it has more of a human resource framework. When it comes to upgrades, I have read both are pain.

For more information

• CMS Matrix – compare drupal and sharepoint, side-by-side
• Comparison by Drupal founder - pay especial attention to the comments of readers.
• Alfresco – for those who desire open-source document management.
• Sharepoint
• Drupal