Next SharePoint?

One of the best ways to dodge feature criticism is to say "it will be in the next releases." I know that, because in our own products everything that didn't get classified as "We tried that, failed miserably, it turns out only one guy actually used it" automatically becomes "it's on the spec sheet, stay tuned.". Well, I was reading Lawrence Liu's article about how SharePoint will embrace RSS with Office 12:

Discoverability is another much needed advancement that needs to be done. One way to achieve it is through syndication (via RSS) of content sources that is filtered by popular keywords such as "offline" or "scalability" or "migration." Another way is through proactive searches where the results are RSS enabled, so the content sources don't have to be as is the case in the former method. Perhaps the most exciting advancement of all is the ability for members of the community to create a "personalizable" community portal, so each person can configure exactly how one prefers to search and discover content. Think of it as the Live.com for the SharePoint community!

It's no secret that one of the most widely used SharePoint parts is the one displaying RSS feeds. Yes, document storage with all the interactive stuff and centralized contacts are nice but despite all the flexibility SharePoint is for the most part ran "out-of-the-box" on nearly all the portals we manage at TheOfficeServer. None of them go in via FrontPage to tweak things (that I know of, based on the support call volume) but oh do they love their RSS part. What is the real problem? The biggest obstacle not just in personal searches but in business as well is finding relevant search results. Bob Rebholz hinted at this the other night in talking about the pitfalls of how the most popular search engines return results based on the number of links. Apply this to a real SharePoint site. Real? Yes, real. Don't look at the cute out-of-the-box SharePoint, look at the real SharePoint site with hundreds of documents, updates, workspaces, contacts, linked lists… finding things in that mess is impossible. So lets say you decide to get organized – create a workplace, with another list. Well what if (not really if, more like when) the next person looks at the way you organize stuff and does in the exactly opposite way? Another workplace with a set of links. See the problem and complexity this introduces? Now look at RSS. Look at tagging. Look at the ability for everyone to create their own custom portal based on the way they organize information. I'll take that over the workplace idea any day!