I won't soft-pedal integration and other challenges associated with licensing point solutions, but there's a role for niche software on your intranet, extranet, or public communities when it gets the job done better than a larger, unified platform. Many platform vendors seem to agree.

Moreover, these comparisons and decisions hinge on more than just current feature sets. When customers who contribute to Real Story Group Enterprise 2.0 vendor evaluations tell us they prefer best-of-breed vendors, it's the smaller vendor's focus and ongoing commitment to that particular service that often come up as the most important rationale for their choice. In contrast, when is Microsoft going to upgrade SharePoint again? Not until 2013.

So, in social computing as in other market segments, there's no pat answer to suite vs. best-of-breed. I don't like saying "it depends" any more than you like hearing it, but... it really does depend on your situation.

Next steps: Get a Real Story Group free research sample or purchase complete vendor evaluations to obtain immediate access.What does it tell us when major infrastructure and enterprise content management vendors employ niche social computing products for some of their own projects? Oracle, Microsoft, Open Text and EMC are cases in point...