sharepoint

What's driving Microsoft SharePoint adoption?

Microsoft's SharePoint has now topped $1 billion in licenses and is perhaps the fastest-growing product in Microsoft's history. What is driving that growth? The same thing that has driven all of Microsoft's most successful products: Microsoft removes complexity (and cost) from existing markets, as Craig Roth notes:

To a certain extent, the excitement about SharePoint has really been a reflection of disillusionment with existing collaboration, content management, and portal products. The people that are interested in SharePoint - despite already having incumbent alternatives - see at first glance a product that may finally provide easy-to-use, inexpensive, web-based collaborative solutions.

Love them or hate them, Microsoft does lower the bar to computing. Its products can be shoddy (SharePoint is no winner in that department - just try scaling it) but that's a trade-off many are willing to make in order to have something, anything that works reasonably well at a reasonable price.… Read more

Yahoo elephant follows Microsoft, Gates

I find it more than a little comical that Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell didn't get any questions about Yahoo and Bill Gates did get asked about it at a SharePoint conference.

Even when Yahoo is not openly discussed, it's always on people's minds. I find myself wanting to ask nearly every Microsoft executive to answer a question two ways, addressing their answers both if the Yahoo deal goes through and if it does not.

That's not to say Gates, CEO Steve Ballmer or anyone else at the company has much to say on the topic these … Read more

Bill Gates and the art of the 'dis'

Old habits die hard when you've spent the better part of three decades perfecting the art of the "dis." Bill Gates may be on his way out, but he hasn't mellowed when it comes to appreciating the technical capacity of the competition.

So before slipping into the role of full-time philanthropist, Gates had some few less-than-kind words for Google's technical chops as he held court at the company's SharePoint conference.

"In terms of Google, not to overstate it, but they really don't understand the special needs of business. Today, their economic model … Read more

Google goes after Microsoft SharePoint

Google Sites was just launched and its target is clear: Microsoft SharePoint. While it has an uphill battle--security and a lack of the complex features that SharePoint has, for example--its biggest problem is that it doesn't connect with the content production tools that most people spend their (enterprise) content-producing lives in:

Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office.

Of course, Google Sites is free, which will cover a multitude of other problems, especially since Microsoft SharePoint turns out to be amazingly overpriced for a Microsoft product. Microsoft has, according to CMS Wire's analysis, completely priced the SME market out of SharePoint.… Read more

Microsoft's massive openness pledge: APIs, protocols, data portability, community

Welcome to the free world, Microsoft. Today Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, announced that Microsoft is making several bold strides to make its software and its company more open, transparent, and community-oriented.

As a Microsoft admirer, critic, and competitor, I can't help but applaud the depth and breadth of this move (though not everyone thinks there's much to celebrate here). It is a banner day in the software industry (and proof that back-room bargains are the wrong way to achieve interoperability).

Ray Ozzie declared:

Customers need all their vendors, including and especially Microsoft, to deliver software and services that are flexible enough such that any developer can use their open interfaces and data to effectively integrate applications or to compose entirely new solutions. By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers.

Amen. But what does this mean? Four principal things:… Read more

Microsoft open sources its Faceted Search for Sharepoint

In an interesting twist on its Sharepoint strategy, Microsoft has released its Faceted Search webparts (add-ons) under an open-source license. As Microsoft notes, Faceted Search is a "set of web parts that provide intuitive way to refine search results by category (facet)." Faceted Search is designed to overcome the limitations that traditional content categorization and search mechanisms (full-text search or category-by-category browsing) have provided:

A good solution to these problems involves exposing the facets in dynamic taxonomies so that the user can see all of the refinement options at any time. The user can easily switch between a search based approach vs. metadata browsing, using a familiar terminology while recognizing the organization and vocabulary of the data.

It's not clear how anyone could use this open-source code beyond Sharepoint, thereby limiting its utility, but I still think it's a step in the right direction for Microsoft.… Read more

IBM fighting the Sharepoint threat

Sharepoint is open source's biggest threat, according to Brian Behlendorf. I concur. But what many enterprise software companies fail to recognize is that Sharepoint is going to be their biggest threat, as well, as Sharepoint corrals content and applications into the Microsoft ecosystem.

IBM, however, is no dummy. It is ramping up a response to the Sharepoint threat, as CMSwatch discusses:

The sheer number of tools and technology announcements coming out show IBM has gotten the message that Web 2.0 is a critical component of business applications these days. Do you think they have a chance of winning … Read more

Survey finds that Microsoft's Sharepoint support = rubbish

I guess it's true that you often get what you pay for. In the case of Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft sells licenses. That's pretty much all its users get. Info-Tech reports that some users are waiting up to six months for Microsoft's technical support team to resolve issues with the product. Six months. 180 days. A very long time to wait for a usable system.

Info-Tech surveyed 258 Sharepoint customers to see what they think of Microsoft's fast-growing product. A large majority are happy with Sharepoint's functionality and total cost of ownership. Nearly 25% say its support, however, stinks.

It turns out that customizing Sharepoint is a big problem for CIOs. Managing Sharepoint implementations, which often grow like a weed, is the other biggie:… Read more

Microsoft's bid for Fast Search and Transfer (good move)

UPDATED: January 8, 2008, 3:30pm

I don't have enough time to fully discuss this but Microsoft's bid for Fast Search & Transfer is a smart move. Having a high-quality search engine built into Windows server and Sharepoint will lock users further in and keep Google out of the enterprise. Search has always been a weak point for MS and Fast makes a good product.

It will also be interesting to see how this fits into Microsoft's Live shenanigans.

UPDATED Alfresco CEO John Newton provides more color here. And Matt Asay asked what happens to the Fast … Read more