Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Sharepoint wiki was last year's news

I've always thought that bloggers have a memory problem (and should use wikis more).  Today, Atlassian announced integration with Microsoft Sharepoint.  Smart people like Dan Farber, Don Dodge, Richard MacManus, Dennis Howlett, James Governor and Robert Scoble are eating up the press release as though a man bit a dog.  But a year ago, Socialtext launched SocialPoint, providing best-of-breed wiki integration with Sharepoint. 

Dan Farber and Don Dodge even blogged about it back then.

Howlett went so far to say today "SocialText, once the poster child for enterprise wiki suddenly looks like an also ran."  Now, really, who is the "also ran" here?  Just kidding, but it is worth talking to me before labeling my company, and not that hard.

I should commend not only Atlassian, but our partner Newsgator for taking the step to integrate with Sharepoint.  Two weeks ago I was the one outside vendor to speak at the Microsoft Global CIO Summit.  Regrettably the event was off the record, but it is more than obvious that Sharepoint plays a vital role in IT strategy for these customers.

Today I'm having the pleasure of an all hands company retreat.  One of the threads of conversation is how part of changing the world means adapting to it.  You can do this from a position of leadership, but it begins with understanding what you are working with today and a little bit of history.  As George Bernard Shaw said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Being the Choice Leader

Nick Carr reports on two studies of Enterprise 2.0 adoption by large enterprises:

Some hard data is coming out this week on the adoption of Web 2.0 tools by companies. Yesterday, Forrester released some results from a December 2006 survey of 119 CIOs at mid-size and larger companies. It indicated that Web 2.0 is being broadly and rapidly brought into enterprises. Fully 89% of the CIOs said they had adopted at least one of six prominent Web 2.0 tools - blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging - and a remarkable 35% said they were already using all six of the tools. Although Forrester didn't break out adoption rates by tool, it did say that CIOs saw relatively high business value in RSS, wikis, and tagging and relatively low value in social networking and blogging.

McKinsey did a broader survey of 8,300 executives with similar demand and adoption patterns:

It found that social networking was actually the most popular tool, with 19% of companies having invested in it, followed by podcasts (17%), blogs (16%), RSS (14%), wikis (13%), and mashups (4%). When you add in companies planning to invest in the tools, the percentages are as follows: social networking (37%), RSS (35%), podcasts (35%), wikis (33%), blogs (32%), and mashups (21%).

But the highlight of the Forrester study for Nick and Richard MacManus is CIO attitudes towards incumbent vendors vs. startups.

74% of CIOs said they'd be more interested in investing in Web 2.0 if all the tools were offered as a suite, and 71% said they'd prefer the tools to be "offered by a major incumbent vendor like Microsoft or IBM [rather than] smaller specialist firms like Socialtext, NewsGator, MindTouch, and others."

Nick concludes: "You can bypass the CIO on a small scale, but it's difficult to bypass the CIO when it comes time for a company to standardize on a particular product and vendor."  Yup. It has always been the case for enterprise software.

CIOs of large enterprises will largely give preference to the incumbent vendors they have relationships with to realize economies and standardize architecture.  Especially when almost all of their budgets are sunk with maintainence fees of said incumbents.  Part of expressing preference for suites is that suites are now available, beginning with SuiteTwo (Socialtext, Six Apart & Newsgator best of breed core offerings).  I find the results of the survey very encouraging -- that SuiteTwo is a comparable preference to Microsoft or IBM.

Some CIOs will go what what (or whom) they know and stick to existing vendor relationships.  That's why we created SocialPoint for the best-of-breed wiki to work with Sharepoint.  As Lawrence Liu from Microsoft said: "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."

As I've said before, when competing in a market of abundant choices, you have to be the choice leader.  Choice is good.  In some cases, you create choice through channels and partnerships.  But you also have to do so through your core offerings.  Today we have more deployment options than any established or upstart vendor.

• Managed Service Appliance (SaaS behind the firewall)
• Dedicated Hosted Appliance (here is a good introduction to Appliances)
• Custom On-site
• Hosted Professional
• Hosted Personal (free)
• Open Source

Part of why we have choice is not all of our customers are CIOs of large enterprises.  Lee Bryant of explores choice and the convergence of SaaS and Enterprise 2.0 in Bottom-up and inside out - the future of enterprise IT?

Euan's subtle insight on how to do Enterprise 2.0 is that there are powerful grassroots energies to not only tap into, but if you impede them you risk your deployment more than anything.  While there is a certain inevitability of Enterprise 2.0 proliferation thanks not only to SaaS, but namely open source, his message is less about the tools than the demand for them and practices that make it work.

Dion Hinchcliffe explores this and notes "Those that represent to be doing Enterprise 2.0 solely through tool rollout and no infrastructure remediation will almost certainly be among those reporting less encouraging results."

This is all in the context of the alternative to how this post began.  Besides large enterprise CIO preferences, there is the bottom up.  And smaller companies.

Lee discusses the challenges of a completely bottom-up approach:

On the technical level, the integration challenges are non-trivial:

• identity / Single Sign On (SSO);


• internal application integration;


• legislative obligations for data retention, privacy and audit; and,


• availability.

But the integration of people, practise and (dare I say) process is even harder, with challenges such as:

• devolving responsibility and promoting a DIY culture;


• encouraging people to grow their own internal and external networks;


• stimulating conversation and debate by overcoming fear of exposure; and,


• for many people, simply overcoming the idea that any form of online communication beyond email is "not part of their job."

Those challenges become opportunities when you have buy in from the top down and IT supports.  And when you have actual leadership, as Suw Charman noted: you have the best adoption strategy.  Lee specifically explores SaaS and rightly notes that it isn't a fit for many enterprises that have customization needs.  He sees two trends in SaaS that have potential to close this gap:

The first is in the area of specialised appliances or systems that live inside the firewall, where they can happily integrate with internal apps ad data, but which can also be updated and fed by managed connections that extend outside the firewall. The Socialtext managed appliance seems to be a good example of this approach, which is a workable compromise between SaaS and purely internal systems.

The second area is enterprise software that takes advantage of managed connections with web services to add value to internal systems. Movable Type was a pioneer of this approach with its blog ping service to feed a public list of recently updated MT blogs. Their impressive roadmap for the enterprise version of this market-leading blog platform suggests they will take this a lot further in MT v4.

You really should go read his post, at least for the Star Wars metaphor.  He concludes that SaaS still has a way to go:

...But the emphasis will shift from software, which is just a mechanism, to services, which is the actual product. Some of these will be new and imaginative forms of what we might recognise as applications, but many will be pure data or data transformation or sharing services. But whilst we will see adoption among SMEs for cost reasons, enterprises will not embrace SaaS for their mission critical systems or data until such a time as we find robust solutions for the key integration and data management challenges.

I see promise on resolving some of these challenges for the enterprise from innovations borne on the web.  OpenID is a good start for identity and authentication, and will find its way into the bowels of enterprise directory authorization.  RESTian APIs are shaking up pre-conceived notions of SOA.  Open Source provides more options for not only these challenges, but is the dark horse for Enterprise 2.0 the adoption race.

SharePoint and the Best-of-Breed Wiki

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 3^rd 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.