An Illustration of Happenings in the World of 2.0
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Socialtext meets SharePoint with Socialpoint
Posted by Dan Farber @ 10:14 am
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blogs.zdnet.com
A bottom up open source and top down proprietary collaboration platform, enterprise wiki Socialtext and Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server, have come together in SocialPoint. Built with Socialtext 2.0 Wiki Web Services and SharePoint Web Parts, SocialPoint allows SharePoint to authenticate to multiple wikis, as well as display recent changes and pages and allow editing within the portal. [fac: did you get all that? read it again if you didn't, prior to proceeding ... ]
Ross explained on his blog, in a somewhat apologetic tone, that it was a practical and profit-driven step to work with what he called a "convicted monopolist." Microsoft makes nice, saying that SocialPoint is a great example of how the SharePoint platform can "leverage a best-of-breed Enterprise 2.0 application based on open source."
Ross claimed that Socialtext is the best-of-breed enterprise wiki product today, and integration with SharePoint can help grow the market for open source solutions and offer more choice to buyers. However, SharePoint 2007 (the current version is 2003) will incorporate many of the Web 2.0 collaboration features. Ross quotes Larry Cannell, who runs collaboration at Ford Motor Company, about the next version of SharePoint: "While I believe a platform like SharePoint 2007 could easily position Microsoft to deliver enterprise-grade Web 2.0 services, I think this may be difficult for them as long as the Office and SharePoint teams appear to be so inwardly focused," he wrote.
"Longer term, with the positioning we have as the best of breed wiki on market, some people will stick with whatever SharePoint comes with, but when more businesses run on wikis, they will look for best of breed offer," Ross told me in a phone interview.
Microsoft is developing features in response to two things," he added. "It is competing against WebSphere and IBM solutions because the solution people offer up wikis and weblog style solutions as way to get larger portal sales, and from the bottom up by open source wiki offers."
I asked Ross to support his best of breed claim. "The one thing that can't be argued with is we were first and the thought leaders in the space. Our goal is to be the best of breed wiki offering for enterprises. It's been our focus since the first day. The important point is that as the market changes next year with more incumbents addressing the opportunity, there is a big opportunity. Gartner estimates that by 2008, 50 percent of enterprises will use wikis."
Best of breed should translate into strong company growth and market leadership. Ross would not disclose revenues, but said his company has 20 percent year-over-year growth. "We know more about getting wiki adoption than anybody else, and what is making wikis mainstream is the solid open source history that has been build up," Ross said. "The point is over time from bottom up adoption of open source wikis and with the growth of Wikipedia, there is more understanding and awareness of what wikis are. Now there is enough of a base of users with experience that they are teaching others. Managers are looking at wikis as serious tools and putting support behind them. Oracle, BEA, IBM, Microsoft, SAP and others won't compete in best of breed, but on their own strengths and benefiting from tight coupling with rest of their suites. One thing has changed, the openness through service-oriented architecture and the ecosystems that surround large vendors make it possible to do things like SocialPoint, and the end customer wins, because they have choice."
In the meantime, Ross and his team of 30 employees will have to run hard to stay ahead of many competitors from the bottom and the top.
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The follow-up to this post can be viewed at: blogs.zdnet.com Heck, I may as well copy that one below, too:
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Whether it meant to or not, Google just responded to the Microsoft/Socialtext deal
Posted by David Berlind @ 8:30 am
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Yesterday, as my colleague Dan Farber pointed out, when you merge Microsoft's Sharepoint with Socialtext namesake wiki, you get SocialPoint. Wrote Dan at the end of the post in which he interviews Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield about the deal:
"In the meantime, Ross and his team of 30 employees will have to run hard to stay ahead of many competitors from the bottom and the top."
Well, say no more Dan. One day later, thanks to an acquisition by Google, one of those competitors — JotSpot — just went straight to the top of Socialtext and Microsoft's lists. News.com's Martin Lamonica has the details:
"Google has bought JotSpot, a 3-year-old company with a system for building collaborative Web pages called wikis.
JotSpot co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus announced the acquisition on a blog Tuesday morning, saying that being part of search giant Google will give JotSpot access to "world-class" data centers and engineers….
….Google's efforts to offer hosted applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets, mesh with JotSpot's strategy to build online productivity applications, Kraus wrote.
"We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online," he wrote.
JotSpot's product is a platform for building wiki-based applications. For example, the company has an online spreadsheet and calendar that multiple people can edit….
….In an interview Tuesday morning, Kraus indicated that that the JotSpot team will work to link its wiki software with Google's current hosted applications.
Ironically, "Mayfield" is the name of one of the venture outfits that funded Jotspot."
For Google to get into wiki hosting is not an unexpected move. As the existence of SocialPoint proves, wiki technology has a lot of potential when it comes to enabling organizational collaboration around information. I'm a huge proponent of wikis and how, by virtue of them and blogs, RSS could easily be the next "intranet protocol." In fact, it should be. About the only thing that doesn't quite fit in this deal is Google Spreadsheets. Google Spreadsheets are not wiki-enabled to the extent that JotSpots spreadsheets are. The two are different offerings and so, some reconciliation of the two will be required.
Afterthought: Had Microsoft been more aggressive on the idea of Office 2.0 and acquired JotSpot first, it might not be in the position it is now where, to match Google, it may have to figure out how to acquire or bring into the Microsoft-fold something that's culturally incompatible with Microsoft's primary mode of operation. "Acquiring" open source and taking it "closed" is very difficult to do. Moving forward, my sense is that Google, Yahoo and others will force Microsoft to not only consider the acquisition of open source-oriented companies and as a result, but also to leave them as open-source oriented properties. In other words, expect Microsoft to be more of an open source company down the road.
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