SocialText and Microsoft
Ross Mayfield has great news today. SocialText released a new version of the SocialText enterprise wiki today. It is new because it now runs on Microsoft’s Sharepoint.
Microsoft’s Sharepoint tool has some amazing features. But, just like other platforms, it doesn’t do everything. While Sharepoint 2007 has some blog and wiki tools, Sharepoint 2007 is not a dedicated Enterprise Class blog or wiki platform.
So, instead of Sharepoint Vs Enterprise Class Wiki, we Sharepoint + Enterprise Class Wiki. I think the same goes for enterprise class blogging systems, such as iUpload and Blogtronix.
In the recent entry, I talked about a A Platform for IT Innovation within the Enterprise. You realize that you want to build a platform that supports constant server side innovation within the enterprise when you realize that there is a network effect associated with using a diverse range of specialized server software.
Instead of building one system that tries to do everything, build a system that is capable of integrating with everything. From an IT perspective, Enterprise 2.0 is about gaining network effects from various systems, rather than choosing one limited strategy that is supposed to be all things to all people.
To me, this development highlights the problem with IBM’s LotusNotes strategy. While Microsoft is providing Sharepoint blogging and wiki tools, Microsoft is also happy to integrate with 3rd party vendors, such as SocialText.
With Lotus Notes, in my opinion, IBM advocates take the opposite approach. In other words, if you use a Microsoft, you can use best of breed new tools, such as SocialText. But if you use Lotus Notes / Domino, you are basically stuck with IBM only solutions. So far, I am not aware of a single 3rd party enterprise blogging or wiki system, such as SocialText, that is designed to integrate with Lotus Notes / Domino.
Technorati Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise+Irregulars, wiki
Please define ‘3rd party enterprise blogging or wiki system’.
The reason I ask is it seems that you are specifically omitting two grat open source initiatives: Blogsphere (a Domino backended blog) and DominoWiki (a Domino backended wiki.)
@Andy
Just stop wasting your time. Trying to convince this “person” (and there were so many other words I wanted to use) of the true value of the Notes/Domino platform is akin to teaching a pig to sing - it frustrates you and pisses off the pig.
Sean—
Just one other question that I couldn’t resist after taking a look at SocialText’s system requirements….how can you consider a platform that runs on only 1 version of Linux and not on Windows at all, supports 1 programming language, 1 HTTP server, and only 1 RDBMS (and it’s not MySQL) an Open Platform? Simply because it has an API? EVERY platform has an API, some are just better than others.
By your own standards, Notes/Domino has to be the most Open application platform ever created since it runs on almost every server platform (including mainframes), supports 4 languages plus all the alphabet soup of standard interfaces, 2 HTTP servers, and 2 databases.
You got some ’splainin to do Lucy!!!!
Sean—
Rod, I posted some questions in my mind here:
http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2006/10/socialtext_rele.html
Overall, this is a good move by SocialText. Organizations investing in SharePoint as common infrastructure would prefer vendors that are able to componentize their back-end application services into “portlets” which in this case, equate to Web Parts in the Microsoft world.
But there are a lot of questions that need to be asked (some identified in my blog post). I don’t have them yet. But the comparison would be more SharePoint vs. a J2EE portal such as WebSphere (or portals from BEA, Oracle and such). SharePoint is both a portal and a collaboration platform and its not clear from the press release as to the extent SocialText is integrating with what is now called Windows SharePoint Services. It this is more of an integration model for SharePoint portal, then the analogy to Notes/Domino might not really be apples-to-apples. It could be if the integration is deeper than just Web Parts into a Microsoft portal. But it’s not clear in my mind right now.
Wiki and blog vendors in general should be examined to see how they connect into portals. Within the J2EE world, there are portlet standards (JSR168). WSRP is another standard that Microsoft does not deeply support (although there is the promise of WSRP consumer support in the forthcoming release).
It’s also important for people to understand the underlying metamodel of wiki vendors. Some treat attachments for instance very differently from one another and may not properly version an attached file or when wiki pages are versioned (creating potential issues from a document and records management perspective.
Closing on the Notes topic again, the Hanover release was supposed to include support for JSR168 portlets in the rich client as I recall. That would enable any vendor to have their portlets integrated into the client (as well as WebSphere portal) in a manner similar to what was announced by SocialText (at least from what can be understood by the release wording).
Hope this helps…