Socializing with SharePoint

The first big news to come out of this week's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, MA is a trio of announcements from vendors seeking to broaden Microsoft Office SharePoint's appeal as a social computing platform.  MOSS's social computing capabilities out-of-the box are limited to the ability to create personal sites, including blogs, but SharePoint lacks some of the more sophisticated capabilities of many other systems.

Vendors including Worklight, NewGator, and Awareness have all announced new social capabilities that plug into MOSS.  Previously, Microsoft announced a partnership with Telligent to integrate its Community Server product into SharePoint.  Taken together, these tools allow Microsoft to better compete with products like IBM Lotus Connections, or even web-based CMS systems including Drupal and Joomla.

All these new partnerships are both good and bad news for Microsoft SharePoint users.  On the one hand, it broadens the depth and breadth of social computing capabilities that one can integrate into SharePoint, on the other hand, it's pretty likely that Microsoft will acquire at least one of these vendors, meaning the others could be frozen out.  In the meantime, the ability of organizations to leverage SharePoint as a social computing platform is rapidly increasing.