Shaping Thoughts

Will Sharepoint hijack Enterprise 2.0?

Just spend the last 55 minutes on one of those great Channel 9 video’s from Microsoft. It must have been one of the last video’s made by Robert Scoble, who recently substituted MS for Podtech, a pod- and videocasting company.

The video was about the RSS, Wiki’s and Blog features of the upcoming release of Sharepoint 2007 (coupled with release of Office 2007, I thought it was planned for the second halve of 2006).
Sharepoint is a collaboration product (groupware) where people can work together, but until recently it lacked the new Web 2.0 like applications like blogs and wiki’s and the RSS feature for “connecting” and publishing it all. But that has changed now: blogs, wiki’s and RSS are part of the product.

Blogs
So Sharepoint now has a real blog inside and publishing has really been made very easy. Comments and RSS do complete that. In fact one could also publish from MS Word (in the upcoming Office 2007). The Channel 9 video showed how easy this really has become. How low can hurdles for people get? By the way, if you prefer this, you could also use third party software like Ecto to post.

Some other features:

• You can do team blogs, where e.g. you would have 4 writers and 1 approver of posts, so a sort of workflow management. This is not really a standard feature of current blogging tools.
• Sharepoint automaticaly fits the contents of the pages to small screens of mobile devices.

Something not in there yet:

• no trackbacks
• you can not ping (like Technorati; but does this make sense on Intranet?)

Wiki’s
The wiki feature looks much like Mediawiki in terms of the markup of links, but more important is, that there is a very rich WYSIWYG editor included. Actually the only markup that is needed is how to create a new page (like [[title of page | alternative page name]]). This is very good! The editor looks very similar to what I have seen in the Socialtext software recently. In fact, even the empty page links look similar to that in the Socialtext wiki.

By the way, Robert Scoble made a nice slip of the tongue when refering to Socialtext as Simpletext, which however is a logical error because the company could even be called “Social-Text-Simply”, to combine two core characteristics of their product.

Some additional features:

• the version history, of course
• wiki + Sharepoint = rights management on a page level! (is this too much?)
• add contact details to pages via including other MS software functionality
• adding web parts (pictures, video’s etc.) at the bottom of the wiki page.

RSS
RSS is everywhere in Sharepoint. RSS has a lot of functionality and MS is making it easy to find the feeds because a lot of people do not really find this easy.

Some additional highlights:

• Subscriptions with enclosures so you get files to work offline with them
• RSS + security = people get the information they are entitled to
• RSS alerts on search within a company universe of content (!)

Extra: Outlook 2007
Most of you may know this already, but it was nice to see Outlook 2007 include the possibility to read RSS feeds (like IE7 will)

Access denied?
During demo there were some access denied hickups which were of course a bit entertaining, but this happens to all of us every day. The fact that Robert has not edited this stuff out, is one of the reasons of the popularity of Channel 9 as a communication channel with MS customers. I keeps it all very authentic.

Will the Enterprise 2.0 market be hijacked by MS Sharepoint?
So what will this mean for vendors with wiki and weblog products looking for business within the corporate world.

Let me say first of all that I am not a Sharepoint expert. In my opinion:

• Companies which are already working with will really like MS to provide this new functionality, so that they do not have to look for this elsewhere.
• The real question is, if MS can get companies to switch into Sharepoint? It depends on the cost I guess and to my best knowledge Sharepoint does not come cheap.

I am curious to what extent companies like Socialtext, Jotspot, and Six Apart feel “comfortable” with this development. To quote one, Ross Mayfield of Socialtext, who actually reacted quite relaxed and confident in a recent post:

I should probably acknowledge Microsoft and IBM’s entrance into the market Socialtext created. They definitely get it, which has been part of the View Source plan. Within a year, the market will grow more than ever, a function of the exposure and credibility incumbents bring. The litmus test will be if they adhere to the openness they seek to extend. As the best of breed, with the openness to breed, our fun is just beginning.

Of course, wiki’s and blog have a long ride to go on the adoption curve and this means those markets can show high growth rates. Getting the bigger companies like Microsoft behind this really helps.

Maybe somebody else is having a strong vision on this? Any serious comment is appreciated.

Technorati tags: Sharepoint, SharePoint 2007, Robert Scoble, Socialtext, Jotspot, Six Apart,Ross Mayfield, Microsoft, Channel 9, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Office 2007, Wiki, Blog

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| posted Jul 11, 10:41 PM on Jul 11, 2006 | category: Sharepoint / Enterprise 2.0