SharePoint is where you put your data if you never want anyone to find it
(Part 1 in my series of “I hate SharePoint, and why every business should use it”)
Have you ever heard this statement before? I know I have, in fact I have lived it countless times in my life going back to the earliest versions of WSS and SharePoint Services ever since Microsoft made this available. And is that story true today even? Sure; out of context definitely. If you continue to do exactly what you are doing today, change nothing and start to leverage SharePoint the same way you are using File Services you will experience the same benefit and value of a pool of data to lose things in. However, SharePoint changes things ever so slightly and for the better by introducing the concept of ‘metadata’ to your otherwise unstructured datasets. Yea we’ve all heard of metadata, it’s where two bits go to get a byte (Wow, I can’t believe I just made that terrible joke!) But it is so much more than that. Unstructured content combined with Metadata, toss a little search services in there and all of a sudden you have the ability to not simply ‘find your data’ when looking for it, but you can go to the extents of searching across an enterprise and making the data available and extensible to an audience far greater than your own.
So rather than simply managing lots of silo’s – Be it SharePoint Servers, File Shares, EMC Documentum, MORE Websites, Notes Servers, Exchange data, external sources, and an infinite number of other resources you’d otherwise be managing individually and be unable to find things – SharePoint changes your game a bit by making them all consumable in one “Pane of Glass” instead of lots of individual “Pains of glAss” :)
So, if you want to ensure no-one ever finds your data, I highly encourage you to put it into a file share, into SharePoint, into a random Wiki you manage and maintain internally; but regardless of where you put it, you can use this tool to ensure that your data is not only indexed, referenced and accessible, but you can continue what you’re doing today in a more efficient and accessible manner so as to flatten the enterprise down to a level at which even localization can come to grips with and understand.