Zlatan posted a very interesting post about Sharepoint and by using Google Trends, how they are already positioned very well amongst the industry leaders.
So if you are interested in Sharepoint, head on over to Zlatan’s blog and have a read on his latest post.
First with Tahoe, then SharePoint 2003 since its release hasn’t really raised too many eyebrows worldwide. As brilliant as they were as web content management platforms, they found it a bit harder to compete and make proper presence in Enterprise Content Management market, and be part of the revolutionising enterprises and bringing Enterprise 2.0 conceptual architectures.
However, ever since the release of SharePoint 2007 Microsoft has been galloping into Enterprise Content Management market and taking over lion shares of customers from known and established brands such as OpenText Livelink, IBM Filenet, EMC Documentum, Oracle ECM (formerly known as Stellent) etc. Companies with more foresight, such as OpenText and EMC, formed stronger partnerships with Microsoft in this space. For example OpenText’s official strategy was to position their flagship ECM offering Livelink with SharePoint 2007 as a front end, saying that “…well Microsoft controls the front end of everything and there is no reason to compete with them in that space…..”. OpenText was also the first one to certify SharePoint 2007 as DoD 5015.2 compliant simply by putting behind Livelink’s powerful Records Management offering.
Clever strategy to secure companies dependency on crucial OpenText technology well in time before the expected “BOOM” of SharePoint Server 2007.
All they were really doing is buying more time as Microsoft planned to make their backend offering just as powerful.
Besides better than usual Document and Records Management, Collaboration and Social Networking functionality Initial Enterprise offering of SharePoint Server 2007 featured InfoPath Forms Services as Electronic Forms offering (ECM people will know what I mean by this) and Excel Services as rich analytical, information gathering and reporting platform. Soon came integration with SQL 2005 Reporting Services (Service Pack 2 I believe) to further bolster reporting capabilities of SharePoint 2007 solutions and give Reporting Services more dimensions to work in (Collaboration, Workflows/Processes, Alerts, Better controlled Security and Distribution etc).
Before you knew it DoD 5015.2 compliance for SharePoint 2007 Records Management came out eliminating further dependency on being complemented by more established platforms to provide full enterprise solutions.
Last two updates have actually put SharePoint in front of the pack.
By incorporating PerformancePoint Server 2007 (now known as PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint), state of the art platform that takes users beyond Business Intelligence and plunges them into new age of Performance Management. This offering is not yet rivalled by any single ECM offering on the market although rival Performance Management offerings exist, separate to their ECM offerings, such as IBM Cognos, Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System (formaly Hyperion) and SAP Business Objects.