Search, Social Networking Key in SharePoint - Page 2

Page 2 of 2

Alternatives to SharePoint

Alternatives to SharePoint Server 2007 are available.

One, HyperOffice, is offered in software as a service, or SaaS, mode. It lets users create intranets and extranets and allows document collaboration, which companies can manage with version control, commenting and access permissions.

HyperOffice also provides Microsoft Exchange features such as business e-mail and shared contacts, calendars and tasks.

Users can access them from any Apple Mac, PC, mobile device or Web browser, as well as multiple clients including Microsoft Outlook.

Another alternative, Central Desktop, offers Web-based wiki software that lets users connect to shared calendars, documents, spreadsheets, e-mail alerts, instant messaging and Web conferencing.

Founded in May 2005, Central Desktop gets about $2.5 million in sales annually, has about 2,000 customers and plans to grow sales to more than $100 million within five years.

Other vendors offer functionality that goes up against SharePoint.

"SharePoint is very popular because it's tied in directly to Microsoft servers and Office applications, but yes there are things in both the EMC [Documentum] and IBM software portfolios that provide basically the same services," Illuminata's Eunice said.

"Alfresco, Zope and Plone are systems in the open source world that could be considered in the same ballpark," he explained.

According to Eunice, open source options are key because SharePoint Server is not that open. "You can't use Documentum or Alfresco's content repositories with anything like the same tight integration," he said. SharePoint is highly integrated only with Microsoft services, Eunice added.

The real drivers

Microsoft has to invest heavily in social networking capabilities or lose ground to archrival IBM (NYSE: IBM).

Already, IBM has beaten it to the punch with the integration of social networking and search capabilities into a product -- it recently released a revamped version 2.0 of Lotus Connections, which has enhanced social networking capabilities.

"We've been watching what's been happening on the consumer side of the world with Web 2.0 architecture and some of the things that have made social software easier for people to consume," Program Director for Social Computing Heidi Votaw told InternetNews.com.

IBM "took those features and translated them into innovative capabilities for our Version 2.0," adding a new home page that aggregates services, adding extensions within the product's profiles services and providing a flexible architecture, Votaw said.

Version 2.0 also offers widgets on its home page, based on the iWidgets standard developed by the Lotus Mashups Team. The standard uses "a lot of the public REST APIs," Votaw added.

Microsoft "has some social software characteristics buried in SharePoint -- the concept of a social page, a blog service, but it doesn't offer out-of-the-box social bookmarking, which we have, a home page model, which we're introducing, or our activity service," Votaw said.

The activity service is a space where business professionals can work on projects and have to-do items associated with those projects. A summary of these will appear on the user's home page.

IBM has also introduced tag clouds, which allow users to search inside and outside the organization and tag information to use on the intranet, Votaw said.

For additional reference, users can also bookmark information outside the intranet, he added.