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I came across a very interesting article on Informationweek today. The article is about JP Morgan Chase, which is not just using SharePoint for collaboration, but using two instances of SharePoint in parallel. Talk about all the efforts of us "SharePoint alternative" evangelists being futile. One's first reaction to this would be that JP Morgan loves SharePoint so much that it cant get enough of it. But the implementation deserves a closer look. Earlier, JP Morgan has been using SharePoint 2007 across its 200,000 large, globally scattered workforce. Over this period it has accumulated a whopping 4,000 "site collections" centralized in one giant SharePoint farm. Sometime in 2009, the IT team for JP started looking for options to add "social" collaboration features to their solution. They decided to go with SharePoint 2010, and build a "social" solution for the company ground up. But they never scrapped SharePoint 2007. The reason given by Mike Aaron Brown, the spearhead of the effort was, "Building a separate system for community and social functionality allows us to establish the ground rules around legal, risk and compliance that come with being in a heavily regulated industry". Sound like a lame reason to me. The real reason, quite apparently was the fact that moving 4,000 site collections from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 would simply have proved to be two disruptive. At some point JP is bound to realize that data in the "social communities" in SharePoint 2010 and the "site collections" in SharePoint 2007 is intersecting and overlapping. Having it in separate silos simply creates redundancies and bottlenecks.  Consider an alternate scenario. If JP had been on a web based SharePoint alternative, features and functionality would have been contnuously updated and added in response to market changes. The "social" features that Brown wants would already have been readily available in the same solution, not requiring any disruptive "upgrade". Another reason why the cloud rocks and on-prem sucks. Â
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