Most of the time

Bloomberg on Sharepoint: revenue, references, switchers, etc

Bloomberg's Dina Bass published a story today on Sharepoint.  Some highlights:

Microsoft Corp's Office SharePoint Server, a program that lets companies set up Web sites, search for data and organize corporate documents, topped $800 million in sales in the year that ended June 30.

Sales of SharePoint, introduced in 2001, have grown faster than any other piece of software in company history, Business Division President Jeff Raikes said. Microsoft says it has sold more than 85 million licenses to 17,000 customers.

The article touched on competition in general:

Standing in the way are competitors including International Business Machines Corp., Oracle Corp., SAP AG and BEA Systems Inc., as well as smaller firms such as Documentum Inc.

Monsanto Co. uses SharePoint to locate research notebooks. Statoil ASA, Norway's biggest petroleum company, replaced a system based on Armonk, New York-based IBM's Lotus Notes with SharePoint for use by 25,000 employees and 4,000 partners. Viacom Inc. and Hawaiian Airlines Inc. run their public Web sites on SharePoint, SharePoint Director Tom Rizzo said.

Sharepoint's adoption is driven by a very broad and active partner community and deep integration with complementary products such as Office, Exchange and Live Communications Server. The clear emphasis of the story is the emergence of Sharepoint as a pervasive platform.

Between the free and paid versions [of Sharepoint], as many as 70 percent of organizations polled by Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner said they intend to use the software.

``There has never been this kind of interest in a product that has just been released in this space,'' Gilbert [Jim Gilbert of Gartner}said.

With 70% adoption rates in the enterprise, Sharepoint has become a de facto standard for collaboration. It's likely that this share and breadth is what's behind the project workload I noted in a recent post.

Symantec acquires IMLogic -- helps adoption of IM in the enterprise

Mass High Teck reports that IMLogic has been purchased by Symantec, beefing up their security offerngs:

Following the acquisition, IMlogic's threat detection and remediation for instant messages will be combined with Symantec's early warning and response system and augment Symantec¹s system, company officials said.

In 2001, IMlogic was founded by Sakoda and now-President and Chief Executive Francis deSouza, who previously ran Microsoft's Real-Time Collaboration Group and built Microsoft¹s first instant messaging server, Exchange 2000 Instant Messaging.

IMLogic was an early partner of  Microsoft Live Communications Server -- LCS -- in enterprises deploying instant messaging. This acqusition will strengthen the business use of instant messaging in general, and LCS in particular.

I'd expect more acquistions in this space by companies delivering either security or instant real time communications products.

ZDNet on the key aspects of RSS readers

I enjoyed this David Berlind post on ZDnet: Next-gen RSS reading platform (Attensa) demos power of Attention.xml 

In it, David discusses Newsgator and Attensa, and hit on the key aspects of good RSS aggregators and readers:

Integration within a familiar offline application

Personally, after trying a lot of RSS newsreaders, I think it makes the most sense to take receipt of RSS-delivered content in my e-mail client which is what I've been doing with Newsgator.  I spend so much of my day in Outlook (the officially supported email at my company)and the way Newsgator can shuttle content from specific RSS feeds directly into a specific Outlook folder is an organizational principal that's perfect for my style of consumption.

Access from broswer and phone

Both Attensa and Newsgator are doing something else that clearly position them as the catalyst for the next generation of RSS readers ...  Both also have a Web-based version as well.

...

Newsgator users can also access their subscriptions through their cell phones but the handset must have HTML-reading capability (some sort of mobile browser).  Not to be outdone by Newsgator, Attensa also has a mobile strategy as well.  According to Attensa's director of marketing Scott Niesen, the company will soon be releasing a mobile version of its technology that works across handsets such as cell phones and BlackBerry's

An enterprise version of the aggregator (currently a Newsgator exclusive)

Newsgator, by comparison, provides a self-hosting option. That design choice could affect the comfort level that some enterprises have with Attensa's approach. 

Intelligent prioritisation (currently unique to Attensa)

Attensa — whose co-founder and vice president of R&D Eric Hayes is a co-author of the Attention.xml specification — has figured out how to prioritize RSS items based on the what you're historically paying the most attention to.  In other words, subjects that are of the most interest to you or that have the highest relevance to your work (based on what you're reading and how you read it) rise to the top (or the mouth) of your RSS reader

One reason I liked this article was it pointed out that the future -- at least for RSS aggregation -- includes a balance of web 2.0 (hosted, web-accessed) and more traditional (familiar client, enterprise-based) capabilities and choices.

The dust is settling a little around the document standards debate

CNet reports today that legislators at the State of Massachusetts are open to multiple formats in the highly publicised debate over document retention standards. In other words, they wouldn't object to Microsoft's Open XML format in addition to ODF.

I've been following this subject for a while, and blogged on it a couple of times, most recently here.

While you can argue that the State of Massachusetts has played an unusually activist role, the State has a requirement -- long-term document access -- that is undeniably important. The two formats they have adopted so far -- PDF and ODF -- met the requirements of being standards-based. In addition PDF met the requirement of being widely (almost universally) used, and ODF is at least broadly endorsed.

You can argue also that Microsoft should have taken the ECMA/ISO path sooner and avoided some of the vitriol. However, better late than never. If the standards and approval processes go as expected, the State's users will be able to continue to use  Microsoft Office after 2007. Good news for Micrsoft, for sure, but also continuity for the State's employees.

It's worth noting that IBM lobbied heavily to prevent ECMA from working on Open XML. It's possible that IBM's motives have little to do with long-term document access and the pursuit of standards. Exclusive support for ODF (thus blocking the use of Microsoft Office) would provide a much-needed market lift for IBM's new Workplace product, which relies entirely on ODF and Open Office.

There's nothing wrong with competing, but Is that what standards leadership is for?

Lotusphere 2006: a disappointing decision

IBM and Microsoft compete vigorously in the collaborative software arena (email, IM, workflow, doc management, ...) yet most companies have a mix of IBM (often Notes/Domino) and Microsoft (Exchange, Sharepoint, Office, Windows, ...) products.

As a result, what customers really need to know is how to make them work together.

Gary Devendorf (a colleague of mine from IBM/Lotus -- now at Microsoft) has continually focused on that. He is personally committed to helping customers use these technologies together and he's traditionally attended the annual Lotus conference in January -- Lotusphere -- to do just that, as an exhibitor.

This year, however, Volker Weber reminded me that IBM has decided for the first time not to allow Gary to set up his humble booth on the Lotusphere event floor.

narrow-mindedness 1 -- Customers 0

Coveo: search that "... just seems right"

I have the best job in town. I get to work with smaller software companies that are delivering unique innovation and value. They sometimes introduce a sort of conflict, too. These nimble companies often showcase Microsoft technology more quickly and better than larger, more established firms, but they also show how much better the products from established companies (including Microsoft) could -- or should -- be.

Coveo is a case in point. Coveo does a far better job of enterprise search than the big guys: Verity, Google and Microsoft. In addition, Coveo provides a special focus on Sharepoint, which is quickly becoming the de facto document store in enterprises. Coveo is a part of Microsoft's private beta program for Office 12, so they'll likely retain and even improve that lead.

Don Dodge and I spoke recently with Eric Negler, Coveo's EVP of Sales, and Dan Bauhaus, their Director of Technical Sales. They took us through the product and emphasised these points:

Some aspects of search are universal: users typically enter ony a word or two, they seldom use sophisticated search terms (even quotation marks), and they rarely click deeper than the first three results (so relevance is king).

Enterprise search is not the same as web search.

Hyperlinks are less-used (and so are less valuable in ranking -- which largely defeats Google's value proposition)

Data sources and types are more diverse (they include databases,  metadata or properites such as authoor and date, ERPsystems, and even video) and ranked results must weight accurately results from all these sources

Crawling and indexing techniques need to take account of corporate network management (for example, Google's crawling is often seen by corporate networks as a denial of service attack).

Search must respect the complex security, rights and policies that surround enterprise documents and stores.

Coveo's support for Sharepoint was particularly impressive. I loved the feature that summarized a document, and extracted key concepts from it.

Coveo has a stellar customer list, including the CIA, Fannie Mae, the US Air Force, and Credit Lyonnais Suisse. A few days after my chat with Eric and Dan, I spoke to Steve Jackson at PRTM, a 500-person  consulting firm in Europe, US and Asia, who are major users of Coveo. Steve talked about their search requirements, and some limitations in Microsoft's search capability, that led PRTM to select Coveo. He made a couple of points that struck me:

The first class nature of Coveo's support. Steve said "they are responsive, and they take ownership of the problem from beginning to end."

Coveo's product " ... just feels right to me ... whoever designed it really knew what they were doing ... like the iPod."

Nice. If I'm going to recommend a company and a product to a Microsoft customer (and I absolutely will recommend Coveo), these are great attributes.

I may not mention the iPod though.

Office Open XML to be submitted to ECMA

Microsoft announced today that the Office Open XML document formats for Word, Excel and Powerpoint will eb submitted to the ECMA International organization for approval as an open standard.  A number of companies agreed to work with Microsft in a technical committee to create the ECMA standard, including Apple, Barclays, BP, teh British Library, Essilor, Intel, NextPage, StatOil and Toshiba.

It's good to see this happening. The pressure from  the State of Massachusetts has received a lot of publicity, and there has been some unnecessarily abrasive writing on the subject.

The real value is an access standard that can evolve as documents gain more capability. The headline aside (Microsoft to Give Office Access to Rivals) the Financial Times pointed out:

The [European] Commission is eager to promote e-government services, but is concerned about access to public documents created in proprietary formats such as Microsoft Office. It is keen to ensure that all EU citizens are able to access electronic government documents without being obliged to buy a specific company’s software.

Really Simple Sharing -- extensions to RSS

Don Dodge just alerted me that Ray Ozzie blogged yesterday about Simple Sharing Extensions to RSS. The technology itself is interesting and appears to be adaptable beyond its original design.

Early on, after we had a prototype going, I met with Dave to tell him about it and perhaps get him involved. Immediately at our first meeting he spotted its potential to solve something else he had been thinking about – replicating changes among OPML lists or outlines being managed within different services or by different people. He challenged us to see if the same SSE mechanisms could be applied to OPML. As it turned out, only minor changes were required. In essence, by connecting these dots between what we’d done to extend RSS and his vision for OPML, Dave's catalyzing a new form of decentralized collaborative outlining.

What's perhaps more interesting is Ray's focus on simplicity:

We’re pretty excited about the extension - well beyond the uses that catalyzed its creation.  It’s designed in such a way that the minimum implementation is incredibly easy, and so that higher-level capabilities such as conflict handling can be implemented in those applications that want to do such things.

and on the importance of community for both adoption and improvement:

We’re releasing the SSE specification under a Creative Commons license – Attribution-ShareAlike. I’m very pleased that Microsoft is supporting the Creative Commons approach; you can see more about this at in the licensing section at the end of the spec.

WebexOne ... wow

I just signed up for the 30-day free trial of WebexOne, EMC's on-line collaboration service (previously Intranets.com, and purchased by WebEx* in August). I'm really impressed, and I'd say Intranets.com was a bargain at just $45M. I'm also embarassed I hadn't checked it out sooner.

The pricing seems remarkably low, ranging from $20 to $10 per user per month. Actually, it is even lower (about $4.50/user/mo) for larger groups and including the discount for a full-year subscription.

I haven't used all the features yet, but the browser-based interface is, so far, intuitive, attractive and -- most important --  fast.

For the file-sharing alone it looks like a no-brainer for small businesses or associations who need to share information easily. I'm anxious to try out the database feature, as I've been looking for an easy way to create and consolidate simple activity reports in my team.

I sync'ed my Outlook calendar and contacts immediately and simply, and I invited five other Microsoft folks to join me. The first reaction from one of them was "wow."

In the small business market, WebexOne leaves the major collaboration vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Novell) looking a little slow.

* In my original post I wrote " ...purchased by EMC." I cannot explain why I wrote that, but I have corrected the post :-) Thanks to Mike Pastore at Intranet Journal for the correction.

Large enterprises considering their collaboration options ...

I haven't blogged for a while. For the last couple of weeks I've been inundated with requests to speak to customers (all Fortune/Global 100) about Microsoft's collaboration strategy. There seem to be four main drivers for this sudden uptick:

• Existing Notes customers are examining their options. Those I speak to (to be fair, that may be a self-selecting audience  -- but I do think it's typical) are stabilizing their investment in Notes development. None is concerned that IBM will drop Notes support, but they all believe that Notes isn't a strategic application platform going forward.  In almost every case, IBM Workplace is also under consideration, so it's likely a Microsoft-Workplace decision. The question is usally "when, where and how do I move?"
• Rapid uptake on some of the newer Microsoft products, especially Sharepoint and Live Communications Server. Sharepoint's integration with Office make it the natural and simple alternative to the chaos of desktop storage and the complexity of high-end document management systems. Not surprisingly, a lot of the questions center on integration of Sharepoint with products like Documentum, which are still required for highly controlled or regulated document management. Live Communications Server is benefiting from strong integration in Sharepoint and Office (especially Outlook), its interop with Yahoo, MSN and AOL instant messaging systems, and its unified inbox and call forwarding capabilities. Yesterday's announcement that Microsoft plans to acquire Media-Streams will likely bring more attention to our VoIP plans.
• The wraps are off Office 12, and companies are noticing Sharepoint's evolution as a Business Intelligence gateway.
• Clarity on Groove as an integral part of Office 12, integrated with Sharepoint, Infopath forms,  and Live Communications Server

Workplace also has a few big things going for it:

• Potential for Linux clients and servers as well as Windows. technically the server choice is broader, but the long run view is Linux or Windws on x86 hardware
• Promise of low-cost deployment from the server
• Some novel ideas arounding connecting ideas in "activity threads"

These companies play their cards pretty close to their chest, so who knwos how these situations will pan out. If I had to guess, I'd say the big challenges Workplace has to overcome are:

• Office integration. IBM will do an OK job, but they'll never make the investment to put, say, Sametime presence into Outlook, Word, etc.
• A confused email story. IBM loves the Notes/Domino installed base, but retaining Notes email means retaining a non-Workplace directory, and a non-Workplace database.
• Little/no instant messaging integration with the consumer network

I'd really like to hear alternative views. So post here or email me.