Well we made it out of the “Twenty Naught” decade into the “Twenty Teens,” and none too soon! Sadly, the first few days of the new decade have been lost to me as I came down with a bizarre bug that has had me in bed, useless to the world.
I haven’t been able to lift my head up to look for SharePoint news, so luckily I discovered that my junk mail filter had accidentally caught two more predictions for 2010, including one from Bill English that I think is particularly interesting and valuable. So let me give my apologies and “fair time” to the two MVPs who were left out last week.

Sarbjit Singh Gill, a Singapore-based MVP who works at UnifySquare Inc in Asia, is preparing for his first-ever FIA sanctioned auto race in June. In my opinion, that qualifies him as “crazy” but his prediction is quite smart!

He predicts that in 2010, SharePoint 2010 is going to be the platform for CEPB (Communication Enabled Business Process). SharePoint 2010 is going to bring Microsoft’s Office Communications Server and line of business applications to a common development platform to allow seamless improvements of usability, efficiency and advance business process integration of communication and collaboration.

One strong point to support this prediction is the vast improvements of BI and LOB integration with minimal code and complexity in SharePoint 2010. Living in Asia, Sarbjit works long hours and has precious little time to blog, which is why he loves the IE 8 accelerators to help in keeping up his blog.

Bill English, an MVP from Minnesota who is weathering the cold and snow, predicts that the uptake for SharePoint Server 2010 will be slow in 2010 due to deep investments in 2007 implementations that didn't occur until the 2008-2009 timeframe. "Many will "kick the 2010 tires" in 2010, but will put off adoption until 2011 or 2012. The economy will need to improve to help fund upgrade projects.

"Technically, migrations will be easier than the 2003-->2007 upgrade paths, but from a business process standpoint, they won't immediately resolve significant pain points, leading to substantial post-migration projects which impose 2010 features on a 2007 data set. 2003 - 2010 migrations will be especially thorny. With the addition of the Managed Metadata Service, the ECM suite will have strong appeal to many mid-size companies who lack a robust ECM implementation, but in the absence of a strong information organization project, many will see limited benefits from the MMS.

"Organizations who adopt SharePoint Server 2010 will continue to see clash-points between what the technology can do and what their application architecture, culture, budget, user skill sets and politics will allow as well as what their business processes will demand. Alignment between these elements will be an art, not a science, and will require depth in technical skills, business process understanding and interpersonal skills.

"Customers will continue to see SharePoint as an application that can (and should) be implementable in a matter of weeks without business and technical requirements. As a result, they will continue to have a difficult time deciding what SharePoint should do in their organizations, which might lead to turf wars between the various teams within IT in addition to conflicting messages to the end users about why SharePoint is being adopted and how it should be used. For those organizations who wrestle with this, user adoption will be slow and resistance high.

"Litigation readiness projects will gain prominence as the legal and compliance officers wrestle with the robust Web 2.0 technologies in SharePoint. The increasing exposure to risk that is inherent in the pervasive adoption of collaborative technologies will force IT and legal to work much closer together.

"The number of consulting firms that will claim SharePoint expertise is shooting through the roof, which means that it will be more difficult for customers to discern between those who have real expertise in this product versus those who have read a book or two and claim to have expertise. IT staffing will increasingly move toward full-time SharePoint administrators and developers.

"Finally, for those organizations who have not adopted Office 2007 at the desktop, they will face significant training and education efforts with the introduction of the ribbon in both the Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 products. Power users of the 2003 products will upgrade kicking and screaming, so managing change at the desktop will become a focus point for those upgrading from a SharePoint 2003/Office 2003 environment."

Bill is the leader of EBA Companies, a team that without doubt has real expertise! I think his insights into the challenges of SharePoint 2010, and other related new technologies, are spot on! Be sure to follow the Mindsharp blogs.

So, from SharePoint Pro Connections, I wish you a Happy New Year and welcome to the “Twenty Teens!”