Will Any Of Software's Emerging Stars Defeat SharePoint?

Collaboration and community are two very big hills for vendors to climb these days. As the saying goes, many have tried and many have failed. Add Microsoft's SharePoint to the growing list of things you'll need to overcome and some might say you're spinning your wheels.One company that says phooey to all that is Portland-based Jive Software. Recently we wrote about how community software vendors like Jive are taking on more of the content organizations need to connect with customers inside and outside the firewall. That means companies like Awareness, Jive, and SocialText are finding themselves fighting more traditional software companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.

In Jive's case, the traditional culprit is SharePoint, one of Microsoft's most successful products to date.

I spoke with Jive's CMO Sam Lawrence this week to get a glimpse of its new Clearspace offering, the ammunition it intends to use as the battle with Big Blue, big red, and Redmond really starts to take shape.

"There's a whole new genre of enterprise software companies making the grade now," said Lawrence. "You hear a lot of vendors talking about 2.0 features and buzzwords, but we see very few companies actually delivering the goods."

That's a statement clearly targeted at many of the entrenched enterprise 1.0 vendors trying to stake out their territory in the competitive community and collaborative software space. Jive affectionately refers to many of the existing offerings in the social networking and enterprise 2.0 market as "frankensuites." That term, used to describe cobbled together Web 2.0 platforms, apparently drew enough fire from Microsoft to spring a flurry of blog comments on one of Jive's Web sites.

But it's not all a dogfight. One of the roadmap pieces includes, you guessed it, a SharePoint integration. Couple that with an interesting acquisition, a new user interface, and lessons learned working on large deployments with EMC, Sony, and Intel and David just might have a fighting chance.