SharePerfect Proof of Market

“The only thing constant is change.” – Heraclitus, 500 BC
The biggest challenge faced by IT today is the constant rate of change of requirements, some
internal (business needs) and some external (remote systems, new devices). Systems rise and
fall on the basis of user popularity and the economics of the market. IT must plan for constant
change but it has few tools to help it do so.
Current information technology methodologies are beginning to realise this with the rise of
Agile development, Scripting, DEVOPs and Continuous Implementation. However to the
beleaguered IT department implementing these means acquiring staff who already have the
skills or training internal staff to acquire them.
These techniques provide enhanced quality at a reduced cost for tackling change but most IT
requests are for mundane, describable and repetitive tasks and the process of implementing
them is itself a mundane, describable and repetitive task. There is a tool that is perfect for
performing tasks of that are mundane, describable and repetitive. We should be using these
machines to manage the process of change.
One of the runaway successes of recent years has been SharePoint with its veritable plethora
of easily accessible user functionality. Its success has also been its biggest perceived
weakness in that the tools for managing it are graphical and inadequate for managing the
average SharePoint Installation.
If SharePerfect, Enable’s Legal Toolkit for SharePoint, was just a better management
interface for SharePoint it would be a much needed innovation but it is more than that, it is a
mechanism for automating change and ultimately removing IT from the day-to-day running of
a SharePoint system whilst helping them with the small number of extraordinary changes that
do occur.
The tools and techniques which SharePerfect will bring to SharePoint are the starting point for
a technology that will allow business users direct control of their IT systems.