Enterprise 2.0 Offerings that Integrate with SharePoint Technology - Conclusion
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The chemistry between Enterprise 2.0 software and Microsoft's SharePoint platform is not something that would have gone unnoticed for long. For many companies, SharePoint is the portal for all their business data -- and not just docs, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs, but also browser-based forms that interact with built-in workflow technologies which add business logic to sophisticated online applications.
Other tools allow for the addition of business intelligence enabled dashboards and reporting centers, enterprise search and application templates that can be downloaded and customized to quickly set up internal web sites and services that provide everything: online help desks, group board workspaces, knowledge libraries, vacation scheduling tools, project tracking workspaces, sales pipelines and much more. Businesses know and trust Microsoft, specifically SharePoint, and chances are they are more than a little hesitant when it comes to the idea of ditching SharePoint -- which would be very costly and inconvenient -- in order to run to the newest Enterprise 2.0 technologies.
That being said, all signs indicate that businesses are very interested in running Enterprise 2.0 applications, and thankfully for Microsoft, they seem more than happy to maximize their investment in SharePoint in order to do so.
Microsoft is surely benefiting from this collaboration, but social software makers such as Awareness are also taking full advantage of what SharePoint has to offer. As recently as a few months ago, Awareness announced their new platform allows for the creation of Web 2.0 communities that connect people and content through social networking technologies and Awareness-powered widgets that can be ported to any third-party services from Facebook to MySpace.
With this new platform from Awareness, Microsoft SharePoint integration is built-in, letting I.T. administrators use SharePoint's scalable and searchable back end to tie together internally-facing SharePoint environments with externally-facing social networking/Web 2.0 communities. This integration also includes the packaging of Awareness's Web 2.0 widgets as SharePoint Web Parts that let users monitor and contribute content, display user details and status, search content and view metrics. Awareness also integrates with SharePoint's Identity Management to allow for single sign-on (SSO), which makes using both platforms together a seamless experience.
For those who thought that Microsoft couldn't possibly see an influx of even more loyal devotees, think again. It seems inevitable that Microsoft's SharePoint will see an even larger spike in popularity as more and more vendors demonstrate their social-computing business tools to new businesses by integrating them with SharePoint technologies. So, on the off chance that a new business interested in social software wasn't already using Microsoft's SharePoint, they will be now. There's still no telling how much more ingrained social software will be in Microsoft's SharePoint, we'll just have to wait and see.
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