I have to say I can’t agree with a good deal of the criticism in article aimed at SharePoint per se – this smacks of the anti Microsoft lobby. What I would agree with is that any technology that is poorly or inappropriately deployed will be likely to fail but this is more a result of the project to deploy it rather than the qualities of the software itself. SharePoint has its faults, and I would be the last to carry a torch for Bill Gates. It is not a panacea for all things and any one that sees it as an application to meet all needs again is reflecting their own flawed insight rather than the product itself. It does have many strengths, chiefly in its ability to devolve the management and ownership of the application widely across an organisation, so if it is deployed wisely with those principles at its heart then emergent patterns of constructive use can emerge. Similarly it can be used in conjunction with many other complimentary applications and social media tools. So we use but it is not the only tool we use; we also have wikis, blogs etc to complement it.

Finally – it is not a knowledge management tool as many wish to describe it. To accept that would be to accept all the snake oil salesmen who try to re badge tired database products as “knowledge management tools”. It is perhaps an information management tool and if it is associated with silos then I would suggest that all it is doing is reproducing silos that already exist in the organisation, so again I don’t lay the blame at the feet of the software – its an easy cop out.