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Recovery.gov on Sharepoint now?

Nadav Schreibman just commented on my post "Is Drupal the right platform for whitehouse.gov?" to say that Recovery.gov is now running on Sharepoint. I was pretty shocked when I read the article and had to check the source on the site. Sure enough, I am seeing Sharepoint HTML in all of its postback glory.

The referenced article from Oh My Gov talks about how the Recovery.gov needed a more portal-like framework. Both Drupal and Sharepoint can be described as development frameworks. Drupal leans more towards being a CMS product (with strong capabilities for developing content) while Sharepoint is more of a portal (with strong capabilities for pulling content and data from other sources). It seems like Recovery.gov, with it's mandate to expose where recovery money is being spent, needed more portal and less CMS. This was an expensive change — the redesign project cost $18 Million, which may not be a lot of money in government spending terms but is more than most of my clients have lying around. Thanks Nadav for the tip!

Google Sites and Sharepoint

CMSWire has a nice little article on Google Sites and MOSS. The general gist is that, while not as capable as MOSS, Google Sites may be just good enough for basic websites and collaboration. The absence of some advanced features may be compensated for by the simplicity of the platform. Sometimes just good enough is exactly what you want.

Over on the Sharepoint side, I just read Michael Sampson's excellent report The 7 Pillars of IT-Enabled Team Productivity: The Microsoft Shareport 2007 Analysis. The report uses Michael's 7 Pillars framework to evaluate Sharepoint. Not to be a spoiler but MOSS doesn't do so well.

I am not convinced that you want one platform to try do do everything but Michael assumes that this is Microsoft's goal (it certainly isn't building a robust WCM system). So, it seems that Sharepoint is caught in the middle. It is not the silver bullet, one-stop-shop for enterprise collaboration, and it is not the simple, cuddly tool that everyone loves to use. That is not a very fun place to be.