SharePoint on the ropes again?

It's a common problem in virtually any industry. Once you become the de-facto leader, or at least somewhere near the upper echelons, then people start having a go at you. Virgin has found it out the hard way, Channel 4 is probably discovering it to a certain degree, and, um, well the less I say about JD Wetherspoons the better, probably.
The tech world is packed full of examples, probably because technology moves at such a rate of knots, it can lead to pretty fluid movement up and down the establishment table - just look at Gartner's hype cycle and Magic Quadrants over the last few years to chart the rapid rise of firms like Google and Facebook and the sad demise of Netscape and the rest. It's been a long while since Microsoft was such a firm, back when Steve Balmer had hair and Bill Gates definitely didn't hang out with Jerry Seinfeld. But on the content management scene it is a relative newcomer.
However, Microsoft does not waste its time, and it's flagship offering in this space, SharePoint, has climbed the greasy pole in rapid time. And although there is debate over whether it is a true content management solution - which it's not, really - there's no denying the figures. According to the Wall Street Journal, by 2007 "Microsoft sold 85 million licenses to the enhanced version of SharePoint across 17,000 companies." And analyst firm Gartner reports that approximately 50 per cent of the mid-size businesses it surveyed are running some variant of SharePoint.
It's definitely one of the establishment in the content management space therefore - and so to the backlash. Enterprise provisioning firm Courion interviewed SharePoint users recently to find that the majority did not have nearly enough visibility into their SP environments and feared the exposure of sensitive data on these sites. Yes, you could probably say Courion research would conclude that, given that Courion is into enterprise provisioning, but it's still a legitimate concern.
Firms need to bring their SharePoint initiatives under the same access and identity management and data loss prevention frameworks as the other disparate technologies they're running if they want to close off this potential back door to breaches. The problem is that SharePoint is often adopted ad-hoc under the radar of IT. The first thing CIOs will need to do is make sure their IT managers get a good idea of who is using what in terms of SharePoint in the organisation. Sorry Microsoft. I guess when your products go to the head of their field, they're kind of there to get shot at.