Infovark

We’re a little late to the party, but there’s a wonderful comment thread over on Shel Israel’s blog about all things social media, and particularly around Sharepoint and Microsoft’s attitude to the emerging Enterprise 2.0 contestants like Jive Software.

All this stems from a quite inspired piece of writing from Dennis Howlett, where he discusses the difference between the established “mega” vendors, and the emerging Enterprise 2.0/Social media products:

In other words they (the “mega” vendors) are transaction based. They are not people based. I’d go further and say they are departmentally constrained, reflecting the internal power structures they were designed to support.

Naturally, this led to something of a flame war, where Microsoft and the SharePoint zealots were out in force, defending the innate awesomeness of SharePoint, and the newer more agile folk were perhaps taunting them a bit more than was polite. All in all, it makes for highly charged and extremely interesting debate.

Personally, I’m not sure either way about SharePoint’s capabilities in this space. I do know that Lawrence’s original comment on Sam’s blog really irked me, and it’s not the first time I’ve encountered him in the blogosphere.

My experience is that I’ve met lots of people who use SharePoint, but very few who really like it. On the other side of the fence, there are converts to the more dedicated social software - (like EMC’s Chuck Hollis), who do seem to have good things to say about the new emerging platforms.

As Dennis says, these are indeed interesting times. And good healthy debate amongst vendors has to be healthy for customers, right?