Mike is very much right when it comes to the expectations vs. current capabiities of SharePoint 2007 as a E 2.0 tool (presumably there's some sort of definition for E 2.0 now). I spoke to Jeffrey Mann of Gartner today about E 2.0 and most of the conversation centred around on-premise / off-premise, corporately controlled / public available, legacy / new, build / buy kind of scenarios. Organisations will have spent a reasonable amount of on SharePoint 2007 installation, probably more if they upgraded from 2003. Sweating this asset is something that a lot of organisations are going to do, especially in the current climate. For those organisations that follow Microsoft's information Worker path and have Exchange with AD and .NET developers it's not a bad platform - single sign-on, basic identity, integration with Office count for a lot. Users like the flexibility, but it lacks in most of the areas it actually tried to proclaim itself in. It's not a good Portal, it's not a good application platform (lists aren't even relational for a start) it's not even a good document collaboration tool and laughable as a document management system if you compare it with what EMC have at the moment. However, it's probably good enough. It's breadth is its strength and its weakeness. Jack of all trades, far from being master of any of them let alone one.
The likes of Telligent and Bluekiwi have tried hard to supplement SharePoint (not that you need SharePoint for get value from either vendor) in ares where it is lacking. Indeed, my company used Telligent for press releases and it did a fairly good job until requirements matured and changed. I've seen demos of Bluekiwi and Telligent and other tools and I've been privvy to what Microsoft are planning in Office "14" being on the Advisory Council for that product. The tools are great, but they still take a lot of getting used to and, in particular, to become habitual to the average user. Microsoft are in a powerful position because of the SharePoint deployments they have and what will come in Office "14" and how it will link in to other tools that Microsoft have - they have a good chance of making E 2.0 habitual. Link it in with Outlook, link it in with Office Communicator, have a client for Windows Mobile (and a client for iPhone dare I say), make it browser agnostic, host it in the Cloud, yadda yadda. Breadth will give the tools the chance of weaving themselves into the natural working day. I saw @LLiu mention once that he'd been on twitter so much in one day he needed time to get back to some real work. Well for most people 'real work' is what they do - it's certainly not twitter. In Gartner terms E 2.0 is probably somewhere between the 'trough of disillusionment' and at the beginning of the 'plateau of productivity' - I'd put SharePoint slightly ahead on the hype cycle.
SharePoint deserves a beating, because of a lot of us have to either sell this stuff, run this stuff, evangelise this stuff or 'cope' with this stuff. E 2.0 is something that as a corporate IT strategist I have to take notice of, but I also have to take notice of compliance, document management, file shares, email, etc etc. It's confusing enough what medium to use to communicate and collaborate for most people without throwing something else at them. Microsoft's attempts to tack E 2.0 concepts onto SharePoint actually makes my life easier as it provides a smoother path to introduce it to the masses and for it to become 'habitual'. Massive paradigm shift is not normally possible until you have a huge change programme in an organisation - and I don't know many that are doing that with E 2.0. It's growing small and organically, it's appearing in the places we know and are familiar with, it's out there on the Web and creeps into our companies. Where Telligent are going with Harvest is probably the most exciting part. Because once you can make this stuff habitual being able to measure it, report on it and then change as a result is very exciting.
A ramble. I didn't spend long writing this so it's certainly not been written with hours of thought behind it, let's say it's straight from the hip. :-)
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