What do I mean by "normal pretty soon?" I tend to be drawn to new technologies that really matter. SharePoint is one, the Amazon Kindle is another, and there are a few more. One of these days I'm going to write a blog on how to recognize technologies that matter, but that is for a different day.
A while back I was an e-Commerce Strategy Consultant. I had the honor of architecting what was, I think, the first online banking mall. Over 20 banking associations pooled their resources to create a common back end-end of banking utilities that could be easily branded for each of their organizations. This was back when XML was more or less science fiction, and so I had a great deal of fun building a bank around it. By the Grace of God I picked the right pony in the technology race and the bank worked very well.
At the time I often spoke on e-Commerce strategy topics to audiences of senior executives. My favorite speech was given in front of a large number of bank presidents. I told them to go home if they couldn't explain why they wanted online banking. If there wasn't a clear business need, then save yourself 20 million dollars (at the time), save your career, and save your sanity and just go home. This was a rather startling approach for them, but it turned out to be good advice. I would guess about 25% of the room did, in fact, go home. On the other hand, the remaining bankers were ready to step up and "git 'er done."
At the time it was very important, when selecting a LOB solution, to make sure that it was "e-commerce capable," or "e-commerce ready," or some other phrase that indicated that the manufacturer had a sincere desire to slap a web page on the application sometime "real soon." I did a lt of speaking then too, and I explained to my audiences that in two years or so e-commerce would be absolutely normal. The day would soon come when the customer wouldn't even have to ask if a tool was "e-commerce capable" because e-commerce would be a natural part of everyone's thinking. Of course this met with a great deal of skepticism.
Now, once again, you are struggling to find applications that are "SharePoint Ready," or to find custom gizmos that will hook up your LOB systems to SharePoint, or to find a consultant who can work a little magic for you.
Remember that you heard this here first! In a couple of years you won't even think about SharePoint. you'll still need tools and training, but it will all be normal. LOB apps will ship with BDC connectors and webpart interfaces. It will all be normal.
SharePoint is the new Windows, or soon will be. When Windows was a baby called 3.X, it was an application interface that installed on top of DOS. Over time DOS's funcitonality was subsumed into Windows. The same is happening now. SharePoint installs on top of Windows, but over time the two will become one virtualized program environment.
Trust me that this is the direction things are heading toward. I am not psychic, it is just that this isn't my first rodeo. I was actually a client/server consultant back in the day. the whole concept of client/server blew people's minds. They didn't know whether to laugh or cry. When was the last time you brought in a client server consultant?
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