The SharePoint wiki was static. As analysts have told me, it lacked robust version control and had sparse editing features. Microsoft's MySites - social networking profiles for the enterprise - looked a little better but still left much to be desired in terms of design.
For instance, if someone wanted to examine their place within the hierarchy of an organization, it was presented textually like the inbox of an e-mail system. In Connections, it was done mostly with pictures of the people and big buttons in which to interact with them over e-mail, phone, or IM. It's not that SharePoint doesn't have such capabilities; they just aren't presented as well.
Throughout the demo, the presenters tried to incorporate Office documents into the social computing conversation. As an example, they checked an Excel file in and out of SharePoint, and showed who you can share it with colleagues. Whether or not this is actually social computing is up for debate.
The end result: While Microsoft is wise to partner with other vendors, you have to wonder if customers won't find this to be annoying over time if they are trying to sell this as a super suite.
This, of course, could change if Microsoft starts working on these tools more internally. But the e-mail interview with Curry left me guessing:
CIO: Some of these vendors you partnered with make pretty cool social tools, giving more choice for SharePoint customers to hook them into the platform. That said, how is the development of Microsoft's social tools going? And what should we expect around those tools (out of the box) moving forward?
We are always taking customer feedback into consideration and working to make SharePoint a platform that meets the evolving needs of today's enterprise businesses. We have the deepest investment in collaboration of any other vendor. For example, we've spent more than $700 million for the 2007 Office system. Add in other investments in collaboration technologies, and we're spending upwards of a billion dollars of investment in the next wave of products. We have nothing to announce at this time, but thanks to the development of new products from our expanding partner community, there are always new ways for our customers to utilize SharePoint Server 2007 to its full potential.
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