e2.oh » microsoft

SharePoint & Web 2.0 Part Deux

Jay Hariani — Wed, 28 May 2008 22:19:20 +0000

Since we come face to face with it so frequently in the enterprise, it’s always a good idea to keep abreast of what SharePoint offers when it comes to E2.0. I blogged before about how Microsoft is avoiding rolling content creation capabilities into the platform to preserve other revenue streams, but there is still a lot of attention being paid to how to make SharePoint credible for social media, folkonsmies, etc. SharePoint, SharePoint and stuff posted The Ultimate List of SharePoint Add Ons and Tools for Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 And Social Networking Features . I’ll also take a moment to plug my personal favorite: Atlassian’s SharePoint connector for Confluence. SharePoint excels at wrangling Office-format documents, but will require substantial tweaking to be a viable social computing platform.

SharePoint & Web 2.0

Jay Hariani — Sun, 18 May 2008 19:11:38 +0000

The Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technology blog just posted on the best way to update a blog on SharePoint. They suggest two pieces of client software:

While I’m sure both of these are great programs, and good ways to generate rich content; promoting the use of client software as a way of interacting with web-based social media applications is a view that, in this day and age, might be held uniquely by Microsoft. SharePoint, which has gained admirable market share amongst “Old IT”, seems to eschew online content creation. While I’m not saying that TinyMCE (used as the GUI text editor in our firm’s Confluence deployment) or Google Docs are as feature-rich as Word, there is certainly a lot of effort being expended to get them closer. This begs the question: When will Microsoft start building web-based versions of Word and the other Office suite members? Albany seems a half-hearted attempt at a SaaS model.

Google Apps Goes Team Edition, Does MS Want In?

Jay Hariani — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:55:11 +0000

Last week, Google introduced Google Apps Team Edition, an interesting way for users of the Google Docs and Calendars services to work collaboratively. Team Edition allows those accessing the service from the same organization to share documents and calendars (and search across colleague’s work). Your ability to participate in your organization’s Team Edition network is verified by email. So, all users from *@company.com are able to access their colleague’s work. The product also allows corporate IT to step in and manage (if they so choose). This creation of a low cost, shadow IT department, where thick client applications rapidly recede into history has some bleak implications for those who have a lot at stake on the status quo. Last week, the NYT’s Matt Richtel wrote that the looming specter of web-based “zero-dollar” productivity applications going corporate may have something to do with MS’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo.

The conventional wisdom has been that the bid is part of Microsoft’s strategy to get access to Yahoo’s advertising and search network – but, Yahoo owns Zimbra (a really cool web-based collaboration platform), targeted at the enterprise, and an upstart competitor to Microsoft’s dominant Exchange Server. I’d guess that trying to acquire Yahoo may be one of the first hints that Microsoft is awaking to the threat that E2.0 applications like Team Edition pose to their Office / Outlook / Exchange hegemony.