The most common question asked by users once SharePoint is deployed is "What do I use it for?" If specific business tasks have not been mapped to SharePoint, it is in danger of not being adopted to the extent it could be. Microsoft helps generate buzz around SharePoint in general, (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/gearup/Pages/General/BuzzKit.aspx) but if the organisation has not spelled out to people what they specifically should use it for in realtion to their actual day to day work, it is expecting to much I think for people to make the creative link to to what they could use it for.

Rollout or adoption is a plan where you review what users do every day then work out how they could do this better with SharePoint. This not only makes sure SharePoint is adopted, it means you can track how well it has been adopted. You can track how much users have moved over to the new methods more accurately.

Microsoft and Google are both creeping closer to the world of distributed applications that the internet promises. But both fall short. Office Live Workspaces and Google Sites are too much "in the cloud" and do not integrate into businesses enough. I want to log in anywhere in the world and be online to all my business data, and that experience to be the same as sitting at my desk in work. This requires a few things:

• Integrated authentication. I want to log in once only.
• A distributed storage platform, that is secure and managed.
• Once integrated application to write and share information.

• Imagine one application that allowed me to write emails or documents or tasks or calendar events or contacts and associate them with a project space that others could also access and search.
• It could have reports, auditing, retention policies, search and workflow if needed.
• I could access it via the internet from anywhere and my internet browser and a username and password would be all I needed to use it.
• I could track all the people involved easily and know what other things they are working on. These people could be anyone, not just people who work for my company.
• My profile stays with me and contains everything I need including my work history (a dynamic CV constantly growing) to my social life, relationships, medical and legal documents, banking, insurance, bills I have to pay, everything.
• I could pull in data from any other location I wanted, either my company or the public domain.
• I could access it from my mobile device or a desktop device, it wouldn't matter, and there would be no need to sync changes between devices since all changes were made directly.
• There would be no need to upgrade, update, patch whatever because the application would be constantly evolving.

Imagine that!

In my ideal world, there would be only one application to do all this, not 10 or 20 like there is now. Who would own and run it? The people of course. this would be too much power for one company. Look what happened with Enron. Like with transport, communications, medicine and the law, these things have to be a mixture of government regulated but privately subcontracted. Ultimately the people would "own" the system and their own content. So SharePoint has the potential to be much bigger and more pervasive in our society than it is now. Time will tell.