Microsoft's Lawrence Liu shares the positioning of SharePoint's wiki offering and how it relates to the Best-of-Breed wiki, Socialtext:
As I stated quick emphatically during my "SharePoint Collaboration and Community Tools" session at the European SharePoint Conference last Tuesday, the wiki functionality in WSS 3.0 was not designed to compete directly with best-of-breed wiki products like SocialText, but rather, it's the integration of a plethora of collaboration and community features that make WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 best of breed as a whole. My presentation slidedeck is available for download here.
In fact, SocialText is the process of developing a new version of their SocialPoint webparts that will be compatible with WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. The key competitive advantage of SharePoint has always been and will continue to be in the foreseeable future the breadth of integrated collaborative and community-based applications that are provided out of the box or can easily be developed with SharePoint rich platform services. I believe that the built-in wiki functionality is sufficient for a very large percentage of our customer base, and many customers have indeed standardized on the SharePoint wiki as part of their overall standardization on SharePoint as the enterprise collaborative application platform. More and more SharePoint customers who want advanced wiki functionality are looking to the specialized wiki ISVs like SocialText to provide it with an integrated user experience in SharePoint by way of 3rd party webparts.
Mike Gotta's gut tells him that SharePoint will enhance its wiki and Microsoft will crush its erstwhile partners with a forthcoming release. I too fear this waking giant. Part of my job is an uneasy stomach. But I did add this comment to his post:
Yes, we expect our value to erode release-to-release, if we don't continue to release ourselves. Which we do in a timeframe measured by days, not years. As first to market and first to feature, we have to keep moving to remain the best-of-breed vendor. And clients benefit from choice.
"It's easy for people to use "that function will be in the next release" to deflect support for business requirements that may result in tremendous short-term value."
Isn't that the opposite of what Lawrence did in his blog post? I'm sure he could have, and your gut could be right. But I imagine it is based largely on an embedded reaction to prior FUD.
