This story ran in Monday's Seattle Times business section and I am reposting here for the Pri0 blog readers.
NEW YORK -- If Office was the Will Ferrell of the Microsoft launch event at the 'Saturday Night Live' studio last week, then SharePoint was its Tina Fey.
Microsoft debuted 2010 versions of both for business customers on Wednesday in New York.
Like Ferrell, Office 2010 and all its cowbells and whistles overshadowed just about everything else. The hype started a year ago, when Microsoft released a mock trailer called 'Office 2010: The Movie.'
SharePoint, like Fey, may not be an attention hog, but it deserves a show of its own.
The Web collaboration software has become the little code that could at Microsoft. SharePoint is now the product that's the fastest to reach $1 billion in sales in Microsoft's history.
Starbucks uses SharePoint to train baristas how to make peppermint Frappuccinos. Ferrari uses it to run its public website. Kraft Foods and its 77,000 users just signed up. One hundred million people use SharePoint, the company says.
'We've got everything from guys doing Velveeta to guys doing 599s [Ferrari GTOs],' said Jeff Teper, corporate vice president of the SharePoint business.
Its success has bred competition. SharePoint now faces threats from upstarts Google and Salesforce.com.
Organizational tool
SharePoint is a set of software that helps people in an organization to work together via the Web. Companies use it to build and run internal websites, also known as intranets, for departments, project teams, the whole company and individual employees.
SharePoint sites makes Word, Excel and PowerPoint files shareable so different people can edit them. It also has a search engine that combs through documents and websites in the corporate network.
'The goal was to create a productivity tool centered around the Web, deliver it at low cost and make it easy to use,' Teper said. An 18-year veteran at Microsoft, Teper previously worked on a similar product called Site Server. That failed to take off because it was too difficult to use, he said. He helped launch the first version of SharePoint in 2001.
Goldman Sachs analyst Sarah Friar said SharePoint solves a headache for many companies.
'If you talk to CIOs [chief information officers]: What is your pain point? 'It's collaboration. People are coming to me constantly saying they want to collaborate better, more easily; they want to find data in a more structured fashion,' ' she said. 'SharePoint has created a great position for itself in being able to answer some of those pain points.'
Features added
Since the last release in 2007, SharePoint 2010 has added features for social networking, enterprise search and cloud computing.
The new SharePoint turns My Sites, a feature for individual employees to set up a personal website in a corporate network, into sites that look more like Facebook and LinkedIn. Workers can profess areas of expertise, update their status, follow each other, tag documents and even 'like' documents.
Windows Phone 7, the upcoming mobile-phone platform that's expected to start selling during the holidays, will have a mobile version of SharePoint 2010. The 2010 version of SharePoint has also been redesigned to include the ribbonlike toolbar that was added to Office 2007.
SharePoint's biggest competitor is IBM Lotus Notes. But other companies are launching products to both nibble away at and leapfrog past Microsoft.
Google offers Google Sites for companies to build internal websites as part of Google Apps for businesses. The search giant also built Google Buzz, a social network, into Gmail, but it drew heavy criticism over early privacy concerns.
Rival's testing
Salesforce.com is testing Chatter, a Facebook-like network for companies.
'The legacy of IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft SharePoint is built around files and making file-sharing feasible across applications,' said Kendall Collins, chief marketing director of Salesforce.com. 'The fundamental question we started asking is, 'Why isn't enterprise software more like Facebook?' '
Chatter borrows the Facebook concepts of an individual persona and a feed. Workers can follow executives, as well as objects such as a sales deal, a price sheet or UPS shipment update. Salesforce.com expects to launch Chatter this year. The company said 500 companies are testing Chatter but has not said how many people are using it.
Kurt DelBene, senior vice president in the Microsoft Business Division, says while he does hear about Lotus Notes when he talks to customers, he doesn't hear much about Chatter.
'Socially networking strategies don't exist by themselves,' he said. 'We have a lot of people saying, 'We know social networking is important. We expect you to include it as a part of Office,' ' rather than making a separate product.
Enterasys Networks, a network and security subsidiary of Siemens in Andover, Mass., has been testing Chatter and been surprised by how quickly employees have adopted it with very little training.
'A lot of our senior executives have been using Chatter. It's really very viral,' said Benjamin Doyle, director of IT applications.
'It actually caused a problem for me because we've been very happy SharePoint users and very happy Salesforce users. There's an emerging battleground. We now have to assess whether an application or capability we're building makes more sense in SharePoint or in Salesforce.'
Company investment
Del Monte, which just signed a three-year agreement with Microsoft for its 3,000 employees in San Francisco, said it has too much invested in SharePoint to consider moving to a competitor.
The company is now on its third upgrade of SharePoint, which it uses to run internal department and project websites and share files within the company.
'It would be difficult [to switch] because of the full and complete integration with Visio and Office,' said David Glenn, director of enterprise operations with the food company. 'It's that look and feel' between SharePoint, Office and visualization software Visio that makes the Microsoft universe sticky.
Goldman Sachs' Friar said that SharePoint has a great position now. The problem is whether it can stay ahead.
'Things like Facebook and LinkedIn are taking over where SharePoint leaves off. I would worry [that] Microsoft gets left behind if they don't move quickly to embrace social media as well,' she said.
'They're trusted by enterprises, but upstarts like a Salesforce.com with Chatter can quickly come along and usurp them because they're not cool on the bleeding edge. Microsoft is always a bit slower.'
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