One of my favorite things about being a consultant in Houston is the variety of different-sized clients I get to meet with from week to week. One day, I may be running a SharePoint installation and configuration walkthrough with a fifteen-person shop; the next day, I may be planning out an enterprise solution for a blue chip behemoth. SharePoint 2010 is versatile enough to meet the collaboration and information-sharing needs of any size client, big or small.
There are three “flavors,” or feature sets, of that software: Foundation, Standard, and Enterprise. But these names hardly translate one-to-one to company size. Many of our enterprise-sized clients have no need for the InfoPath integration or FAST search engine offered with SP 2010 software Enterprise. And likewise, some of our smaller clients have very specific requirements that demand the Enterprise feature set.
Whether or not a client decides to invest in the Enterprise features of this software, they may always choose to upgrade down the road. Microsoft makes the upgrade process as easy as navigating to Central Administration and entering the new license key. And ta-da! Enterprise features are enabled across the farm.
I mentioned one of the more notable Enterprise features above: InfoPath integration. SP 2010 Enterprise’s InfoPath form services are an important tool for both deploying and maintaining any information-capturing functionality on a collaboration portal. As a consultant, InfoPath form services make it easier for me to create and deploy forms to share point than, say, building out a web part or two in Visual Studio. It is also easier for a given SP client to take ownership of their new portal using InfoPath (an Office 2010 product) versus learning C# and building their own web parts, in the case that they want to add or modify some functionality down the road.
Gauging the potential benefits and tradeoff of the software licensing is an important part of envisioning any SharePoint 2010 solution. But one thing is for sure: It’s hard to go wrong with this software, no matter how big your company may be.