Monday morning at Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston was a day Microsoft will probably want to forget: MOSS 2007 was hammered by Lotus Connections, as an enterprise social software solution, out-of-the-box.
IBM really did put on a great show and demo at Enterprise 2.0, led by Suzanne Minassianminassian@us.ibm.com and Heidi Votawheidi_votaw@us.ibm.com. Their preparation and presentation of Lotus Connections were superb !
Earlier today I attended and spoke at KM Conference, in Tel Aviv. At first glance, I didn’t like what I heard – the speakers referred to MOSS as ‘the best portal solution in Israel and WW’. Folks, MOSS has two distinctive pieces: Sharepoint team services and document sharing (WSS) and Sharepoint Portal. All the 3rd party vendors (which sponsored the conference) enhanced the team collaboration and document sharing. MOSS does have a big piece of market share, especially in Israel, but organizations often use its team collaboration piece, thinking they have a full-featured portal solution.
Here’s a short selection of what went down this week in Boston:
CIO.com: Enterprise 2.0 Faceoff: Microsoft Lags Behind IBM in Social Software
While both vendors showed their products could integrate with existing e-mail systems (especially e-mail systems that they sell, such as Notes and Exchange), IBM’s Lotus Connections looked, at minimum, a year or more ahead of SharePoint in its social computing capabilities out of the box.
CMS Watch: IBM-Microsoft shoot-out at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference
IBM came off looking better for various reasons. They fielded a more focused demo team — never to be underestimated — but also because Connections has some slick, Ajax interfaces, and SharePoint does not. Ajax does not necessarily bring better usability, but done right, it can simplify complex interfaces.
ITSinsider: First day surprise at Enterprise 2.0 Boston
The first one, Social Computing Platforms: IBM and Microsoft revealed an unlikely sturdy competitor in the sea of terrific startups that are competing in this new arena. IBM, yes, IBM demonstrated a competitive product. I had never seen such a thorough demo of Lotus Connections. It had a terrific UI, more 2.0 features than I could even keep up with, and the woman who was taking us through the demo, clearly “got it.”
agile in atlanta: IBM shows Microsoft that social computing is about the people
Apparently Microsoft focused on email and document management, which did not wow the crowd. IBM got points for talking about how social networking is about the people.
The Intelligent Enterprise: IBM-Microsoft shootout at Enterprise 2.0
IBM came off looking better for various reasons. They fielded a more focused demo team — never to be underestimated — but also because Connections has some slick, Ajax interfaces, and SharePoint does not. Ajax does not necessarily bring better usability, but done right, it can simplify complex interfaces.
The twitter message quoted here belongs to Lawrence Liu, Microsoft’s SharePoint Senior Technical Product Manager, which sums up nicely the difference between IBM and Microsoft, in the enterprise social software space.
It’s been quite a week for me, which started with army reserve, followed by spending 8 hours with Jeff Schick (IBM VP, Social Software) and Arjan Radder (Social Software Sales Mgr., IBM EMEA) during their visit to Israel and ended up with more army reserve.
