Stu Downes

There has been some interesting debate which was focused by this SharePoint Team blog post back in January (yeah I’m slow off the mark pulling my thoughts together here).

This post is a collection of my thoughts to date on this subject.  A lot of people have been talking about this both in their blog posts and at a customer engagement level.  I have some views on the subject and I’ll share some of them here.  So what do I need?

So for me I still actually want a file share, I still need a file share.  Not all my applications will allow me to publish directly into a personal collaboration space (but my file server allocation can be much smaller than it is today).  I also want a collaborative workspace, just for me!  Here I can show my work in progress and hide some other things I don’t want you to see.  I then accept that I’ll have some work published into team workspaces and perhaps more formally released and hence stored in document libraries.  Well I’d still like to keep track of my work and have it simply to hand so I’d like my collaborative workspace to include links to all my published work.

Then as teams and projects we’ll need similar workspaces with work in progress, published work, document libraries and more project focused elements (task tracking etc).

Now the great news is that the major vendors IBM and Microsoft already offer this, ok maybe not out of the box and with a bit of tweaking but you can do this now.  I don’t feel at present we can remove the file server element completely, but I do feel we can move to a point where we are less dominated by a file server and more dominated by a rich collaborative workspace.