DISQUS

Brilliant stuff this - i wish I had thought of that method way back when I wrote that series. Gold metal clever workaround mate :-)

Philisophically for the record, I am pretty close to the way Arno views the world myself. (ie just because I am a SharePoint consultant there have been many occasions where I have recommended people choose something else - and I also use WordPress proudly :-).

Liking SharePoint is one thing - determining if is the right fit - and therefore a suitable ROI is another.

I previously wrote a 5 article series attempting to educate IT and engineer/develop type thinkers to have more of an understanding of how CFO's and senior management tend to approach ROI considerations. The first 2 articles explain discount cash-flow which is one of the most basic ROI tools. The next 3 are specific scenarios.

http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/11/17/lea...
http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/11/25/lea...
http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/11/28/lea...
http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/12/08/lea...
http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/12/09/lea...

ROI is definitely *supposed* to be quanfitable. the methodology for quantifying is the trick and in the series above, I wrote on the most common and basic method. By quantifiable, I do not mean platform fanboys playing pissing-in-the-wind on some low level technical consideration either. (Slashdot demonstrates pretty effectively that some nerds have a tendency to see the world in very black and white terms. When looking at ROI they look at technical features and do not do a great job to relate it back to the issues that the rest of the population cares about.)

(Blatant plug alert) The "thinking sharepoint" series is another series that looks at the sorts of considerations that are often overlooked. The maturity of the organisation as a whole is a greater impact on SharePoint ROI than the technology alone.

http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2008/06/14/thi...
http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2008/06/26/thi...
http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2008/07/23/thi...
http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2008/07/29/thi...

Anyway, I am also strongly in the "it depends" category. To answer "Yes" makes no sense to me at all and is potentially risky.

cheers

Paul

Hi Matt

It sounds like your as cynial as I am. MVP seems to require you to hang out on forums and provide a lot of free support, so I doubt thats going to happen anytime soon with me. I also don't drink all of the SharePoint kool-aid and that may not make me the ideal poster-boy. (can you sense the sarcastic undertone behind this series?)

In relation to your other comments, remember that I am trying (in vain) to write for a wide variety of audience. Many of my clients do not have signifiant expertise in SharePoint and I was thinking specifically about them when writing it.

You sound like an experienced developer or infrastructure person, and if so this stuff is not necessarily for you. Additionaly, I don't know about you, but InfoPath isn't exactly riveting reading, so I do try and make it a little more entertaining. Humour is always a hit and miss affair

regards

Paul

Mauro good article and for what its worth I really liked that book you co-authored. On the topic of SharePoint security, readers may be interested in a little experiment I performed the other day and posted about here:

http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2008/07/22/usi...

regards

Paul

Excellent article! One of the best i have read fo a while!