Feature graveyards

Ed Brill points to a CRN article and review of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). I'm tempted just to one-up Ed ("Hey! Groove and InfoPath and WSS - rockin'!"), or to talk about serverless infrastructures, but my noodling turned into more of a requiem for feature obsolescence.

The review is good coverage of WSS, although slightly strange about Groove (which it asserts several times is "offered as a service" - huh?). Now here's some from Michael Vizard's article:

What was old is new again as Microsoft moves to bundle more distributed system services into its operating system... With the advent of SharePoint, Microsoft is doing to Lotus Notes what it did to Novell three or four years ago. In essence, the services needed to make any application inherently collaborative are now just a part of Windows Server.

Some of this definitely hits the mark. But collaborative infrastructure needs slightly more than just an integrated application server, and is bound by the qualities of that infrastructure too. Not for nothing is Groove's SharePoint integration called "Mobile Workspace"; it's basically the same application, unbound from the server.

I may be wrong, but OS-bundled collaborative offerings have been tried before, and not stuck. They're in the feature graveyard: probably functional, possibly supported, unused.

Feature Graveyards

For an example, try this. In IE's toolbar (if you're using Windows 2000 or later), you'll likely see a "page"-style icon with a tooltip "Discuss". I bet you never clicked it, but now's a good time to try. What happens? A "discussion toolbar" appears at the bottom of your IE window, and apparently lets you connect the current webpage into a server-based discussion. The same feature appears in all the Office applications, too (Tools - Online Collaboration - Web Discussions). But if you can actually connect that to a real server and use this facility to discuss the page with friends and colleagues, you're a couple steps beyond me. I trawled MSDN to find out how to configure a server for this, and: it's a feature called Office Server Extensions, from the Office 2000 Resource Kit. For its day, this was cool. No word whether it's still a part of Office XP or Office 2003.

This contextual collaboration fails because the infrastructure isn't there. OSE seems to be in the feature graveyard, with SharePoint riding the wave instead.

Switch now to {insert your application here}. I'm preaching to the choir if I say that contextual collaboration -- enabling high-fidelity commentary and decisionmaking in the context of your {CRM, ERP, library, research tool, design tool, etc} -- is valuable. Could you implement that against a SharePoint (read: vanilla Windows 2003) server? You'll need to crack open the SharePoint SDK documentation, and learn about the range of SOAP services exposed by WSS. Unfortunately, the details are quite hard to master. If you want "presence" as well as discussions, there's a separate server too. It's a major undertaking for an ISV. (To be fair, using Groove to do all this is still too difficult).

In the end, deployment and simplicity seem to matter; and deployment above all. Office 2003 is chock-full of really nice integration points with WSS - but unless the services really pervade your infrastructure, I'm a little sceptical whether they'll be widely used.

(Here at Groove we should have a structural advantage; the "services infrastructure" is all client-side...)