SharePoint leading the way to "Enterprise Web 2.0" says Forrester research
Wikis, blogs, and social networks are gaining traction within enterprises, and Microsoft's SharePoint Server will continue to be the dominant tool in that space says Forrester. In a report released in late Jan08, Forrester Research indicates that businesses will leverage RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, mashups and social networking tools to help make their employees' collaboration efforts more efficient and productive. Technologies and tools such as these are part of what is increasingly being referred to as "Web 2.0". Up to now many IT departments have resisted Web 2.0 technologies because they believed them to be consumer tools, however, Forrester analysts expect a sizeable portion of those companies will put these on their priority list to add it by year's end, and this will be part of the evolution from the consumer-oriented Web 2.0 to the Enterprise Web 2.0.
There are several reasons for this, including things like many knowledge workers posting their own blogs or using social networks such as Facebook to connect with people in the workplace. So moving forward, IT managers will deploy enterprise-ready tools to give their employees a more secure outlet for such collaboration. Of course, SharePoint Services (WSS) has functionalities such as RSS feeds, wikis, and blogs built in and accessible to the workers, but at the same time providing a secure platform. One Forrester researcher points out that even though challengers will attempt to "downplay the quality of SharePoint's wiki, blog and social networking functionality, Microsoft will still get a lot of traction with its collaboration suite in 2008". Of course, it doesn't hurt that these features are built into Sharepoint Services v 3.0 (which is a free add-on to the Server 2003 platform and built into Server 2008), and that WSS is highly integrated with the Office platform, and last, but not least, that it has already captured a significant share of the knowledge worker customer space.
I thought this would be an interesting post. I'm hoping it will do a couple of things: 1) remind my partner audience of the capabilities and functionality in WSS v3.0 that can be used to help their customers collaborate more efficiently and productively, 2) show that industry analysts are recognizing that there is significant potential in using these features for business collaboration purposes, and 3) point out, or reinforce, why they (partners) should be considering how they can leverage WSS as a value-add solution for every infrastructure proposal they do. In fact, there are many partners out there who already consider a WSS implementation as a standard part of every deal they do.
Got WSS?