On SharePoint and collaboration
SharePoint is becoming the de facto collaboration platform in Exchange-enabled organizations, not in all organizations
By
Michael Osterman
,
Network World
, 01/10/2008
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A recent article on Microsoft SharePoint discussing a study that we did on its penetration might have led some to believe that our conclusion was that
SharePoint would become the de facto collaboration platform for almost all messaging users. However, despite the fact that
SharePoint is growing in popularity, the real conclusion from that study was that SharePoint is becoming the de facto collaboration
platform in Exchange-enabled organizations, not in all organizations.
Clearly, SharePoint is widely used among organizations that use Exchange and for a variety of good reasons. It integrates
well with the de facto desktop productivity application, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft’s aggressive licensing policies are
inducing many organizations to purchase and deploy SharePoint. Further, Microsoft touches just about every part of many organizations’
IT infrastructure, and so SharePoint is a logical consideration. SharePoint’s use for mission-critical applications is growing
and it will be the dominant collaboration platform in Exchange shops.
However, there are lots of other collaboration platforms out there. Lotus Notes/Domino, Sametime, QuickPlace, Quickr and Unyte,
among other Lotus offerings, provide a variety of rich collaboration features. Novell GroupWise and Teaming + Conferencing
provides social networking, team collaboration and other capabilities. Cisco WebEx, Socialtext, Jive Software, Citrix, Illumio,
Central Desktop, Siemens and many, many other vendors all offer a variety of collaboration tools that provide very good functionality
and growing set of useful features.
The bottom line is that SharePoint will be widely used along with other Microsoft offerings like Office Communications Server,
primarily by Exchange-enabled organizations. However, Lotus collaboration tools will also be widely used, primarily by Notes/Domino-enabled
organizations. The same goes for Novell and other vendors with significant numbers of messaging users that will be migrated
to their respective vendors’ collaboration platforms.
Comments (2)
RE: On SharePoint and collaborationBy Gavin Bollard on January 10, 2008, 3:25 pmI can't quite figure out how anyone could think that we would jump from an established system like Domino to a relative newcomer like Sharepoint simply because it...
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RE: On SharePoint and CollaborationBy AnilPrajapati on November 25, 2008, 3:12 amCheck out cyn.in as well. It is an OpenSource collaboration software that has an inbuilt OS. Well, It is Microsoft's proven strategy (to promote / push new software...
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