Microsoft’s response to the launch of Google Sites, aka the relaunch of their JotSpot acquisition, arrived with news of the opening of the Microsoft Online Services beta. The cynically minded might note it’s another opportunity for Microsoft to encourage more people to install its Flash competitor, Silverlight, as well.

Loading Silverlight lets one see a video of a guy and his dog playing out a metaphor for company desires to move ahead versus the IT department holding them back. System administrators will be grateful for the swipe, no doubt.

On to the services. The limited beta test of Microsoft Online Services revealed hosted options for Exchange Online (email and calendar), SharePoint (document collaboration and sharing), and Live Meeting. Microsoft touted participation from big firms like Coca-Cola and Ingersoll-Rand in a statement about the debut.

Exchange hosting is nothing new. Microsoft’s page on ‘How to Buy Exchange Services’ dates all the way back to March 2006. In a way, Microsoft’s entry into online services also provided the company with a rebranding opportunity.

Purchasing options vary for Microsoft Online Services, depending on whether or not a business currently has a Microsoft Software Assurance program in place. Those that do can purchase per-user licenses at a discount.

Weekend rumors of Microsoft possibly opening up the Office productivity suite, and major revenue contributor, to the Internet proved unfounded. As long as it’s a multi-billion dollar cash cow, we don’t see Microsoft responding to any perceived pressure that they need to put Excel and Word online.

Funny story: Atlassian is an enterprise wiki used all over the place. It’s built on Java.

Atlassian’s role in this? They are building a Sharepoint connector. Why do that? After all, Sharepoint has its own wiki service?

Cause Atlassian’s is better and Microsoft’s customers were asking it to support Atlassian’s.

Anyway, I’ll have a video up with Atlassian talking about this in a few minutes.

UPDATE: Here’s Atlassian’s blog talking about the connector.

Comments

A video of the conversation and Sam’s thoughts are on Port 25.

Even more interesting to me given my role at Microsoft is that Socialtext has built a Sharepoint integration (“Socialpoint”). This gives Sharepoint users access to a best-of-breed wiki and blogging engine while retaining presence, Office integration, and a unified portal infrastructure. My inner geek got going when Ross described the new protocol handler they’ve built – “socialpoint:foo/bar” – for navigating within Sharepoint across wikis. I think this is a good example of how Microsoft platform software should be combined with open source applications. We continue to invest in scaling the infrastructure, and open it up to developers for innovative applications that can change as often as customers require.

Comments

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | FurlFurl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.

First of all, the humanizing of Microsoft has changed my attitude about the convicted monopolist. I believe that great people can work to change organizations, not just from Ray Ozzie on down. I’d rather be part of communities of change. I’ll still be a stalwart critic of the organization, but know I will have constructive conversations as a result.

Second, I believe that our Open Source solutions cooperating with Microsoft may grow the Open Source community as a whole. Most people won’t see this in Microsoft’s best interest. I do. Some people won’t see this in Open Source’s best interest. I do.

Third, SharePoint 2007 is an incumbent entry into the market that validates and grows the category. There is an increasing role for the best-of-breed wiki in the long term. Markets reward choice.

Fourth, the short-term role for a best-of-breed wiki the works with Sharepoint is immediately apparent. Here’s what Larry Cannell, who runs collaboration at Ford Motor Company, had to say about the next version of SharePoint:

However, this highlights a potential risk of leveraging SharePoint for use cases like blogs and wikis. While SharePoint can provide scalable services that standard blog engines may struggle to support, there could be other tactical issues (in addition to the lack of support for wiki links) that are exposed and can not be resolved until a capability is built into the platform (which could be a long time given release cycles).

These nagging questions, along with the broadly assumed definition of “enterprise” to mean an intranet running all Microsoft products, left me unsure whether Microsoft will become an enterprise Web 2.0 company any time soon. 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.

Fifth, there is the profit motive, balanced by freedom. This will sell more seats of both Socialtext and SharePoint. More users and users as developers can choose, even in an IT environment.

This wasn’t the easiest decision, but whenever faced with a difficult one, just listen to your customers. Here’s what the first SocialPoint customer had to say:

“We are also very excited about the possibility of integrating Socialtext with our growing Microsoft SharePoint installation. Combining the structure of SharePoint with the open, flexible features of Socialtext’s wiki is a great solution for supporting teamwork.”

Right now, I’m intently listening to our community. The decision is if we should undertake another first with uncertain benefits, if we should release the first SharePoint Web Parts under an Open Source License.

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.

A new tutorial series has started at IBM. This one will take visitors through the process of designing, developing, and deploying a web site, using resources available from the open source community.

The collaborative website, for the fictional International Business Council, requires a variety of groupware-oriented services to satisfy the needs of the phantom client. A quick review of the requirements looks suspiciously similar to those of a product provided by a certain technology company in Redmond, Washington.

From IBM’s project page: “The new, customized Web site must have document storage, discussion groups, specialized workgroups, conference scheduling, schedule session descriptions, session expiration, and other tasks.”

From Microsoft SharePoint’s page: “Using the combined collaboration features of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, users in your organization can easily create, manage, and build their own collaborative Web sites and make them available throughout the organization.”

IBM will educate its site visitors about developing this type of site throughout its tutorial. One facet of the initial setup involved finding a framework upon which to base the project.

After considering several open source options – Mambo, Typo3, Ruby on Rails, Movable Type, WordPress, and TextPattern – IBM’s project chose Drupal for its framework. (No mention of Joomla, oddly enough, but that’s probably because it’s a Mambo fork.)

Drupal is written in PHP, and powers the Spread Firefox website; also of interest is their summer training program they plan to conduct in India, our readers there may wish to note.

Drupal will serve as IBM’s test bed for construction of IBC’s new presence. IBM trio of tutorial taskmasters wrote of their rationale for selecting Drupal:

With the selection of the framework complete, the series will turn to design and other topics related to the completion of the progress. IBM’s reputation needs no embellishment here; developers holding an interest in constructing a collaborative portal with open source technology will benefit from IBM’s insights.

—

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.