Is telling lies about the competition a good idea at a vendor conference or in a political campaign?

Neither is acceptable if you ask me!  This week, I had an opportunity to attend an AIIM seminar in Washington, D.C. with the intriguing title, “Is SharePoint Enough? Automating Document Centric Processes.”  From the detailed description, my expectation was that I would learn about image capture hardware and software technologies that complement SharePoint.  This is relevant for one of my current engagements so it seemed like a worthwhile investment of my time.  For the most part, I saw really cool hardware and listened to interesting case study presentations.  The one exception was one where the “performance” by the presenter/vendor reminded me of some of the outrageous and fairly nasty attacks one might see in a political campaign.

Since I know other people from this company and they are really good and decent and I can’t imagine any of them would do what this guy did, I’ve decided not to name names (though I do wish there was a Politifact.com (http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/) for software conferences!).  I’m just going to say that the title of the talk was “Got SharePoint? Get Control!” and if this rotating seminar hits your town, pay attention to what this vendor presents as a “fact” and double check what you hear.  If this company is going to allow one of their employees to make a presentation at a conference about SharePoint, it’s just really bad form to bash the product that people are there to talk about and it’s even worse form to tell “pants on fire” lies about supposed “limitations.”

So what was so offensive?

Instead of describing his complementary solution to SharePoint, the speaker elected to describe why his solution was good and why SharePoint was bad for the enterprise (using practically that expression, by the way).  To make his point, he told some pretty outrageous non-facts about SharePoint capacity “limitations.”  Here is one of several: the speaker incorrectly presented as a fact that you cannot have a SharePoint site with a database greater than 50Gb. This myth is easily dispelled with a quick Google search, which, among other results, will take you to Joel Oleson’s very well done SharePoint blog post from 2006 which addresses this issue very succinctly: http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/10/06/SharePoint-Tech-Content-Database-sizing-and-capacity-planning-_2800_backup_2F00_restore-implications_2900_.aspx as well as this more recent post in which Joel consolidates a bunch of capacity planning links: http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/07/09/capacity-planning-key-links-and-info.aspx.

In another example, he told the audience that you couldn’t store a document greater than 50MB in a SharePoint library. Also not true, though depending on the type of content (for example, video), a SharePoint document may not be the optimal location for storage.  However, it’s totally possible to store a document greater than 50MB in a SharePoint document library – just ask the all the people that do it every day!

But it didn’t stop with misrepresented facts: at the end of the talk, the presenter invited the audience to come to his booth after the show to share their “SharePoint horror stories” with him.  OK, I don’t love it when politicians tell lies and distort the facts in a political campaign, but I guess we’ve almost come to expect that these days.  But this invitation was really over the top – especially when the speakers were admonished not to give blatant “product pitches” in their presentations and to only present case studies.  Moreover, this hardware/software/services vendor and Microsoft are partners and they have a professional services group explicitly focused on deploying SharePoint solutions!  SharePoint and their content management solution co-exist very nicely in many, many organizations.  So this particular invitation, expressed in this way, was neither necessary nor appropriate, and definitely not in keeping with the theme of the event.

To the folks at AIIM: I don’t care how much these guys paid to speak at your seminar – tell them to get someone else to deliver their “case studies.”  I find attack ads just as offensive in a political campaign as I do at a software conference.  In this case, the “partner” was attacking SharePoint in front of an audience interested in solutions complementary to SharePoint, which is almost more stupid than offensive, and definitely not good form.