Thursday, 4 November 2010

Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace


Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace

With SharePoint 2010 Microsoft has taken a great lead with social software. Accroding to Gartner's recent Magic Quadrant Microsoft is in a tight fight with Jive and IBM. Interesting that IBM Lotus technology has been established so much longer and yet Microsoft has been able to come up to if not beyond it.

Jive is an interesting company that has thrown so much in to the Social Web, and as I read Magic Qadrants this one says SharePoint 2010 and Jive are probably overall equal, with slightly different strengths. Remember that this is only valid for 2010. SharePoint 2007 Social capacity can be summed up in one empty phrase "blogs and wikis". In short really nothing.

I don't mean to pound on this drum too much but for most organisation, even teams with less than a 100 members or even 1,000 members it is highly unlikely you will get 1 active blogger and impossible to get the 5 people you would need to make a Wiki. Blogs and wikis are certainly key parts of Web 2.0, but they require massive crowd sourcing since they are governed by extreme power laws. Only a tiny fraction of users will contribute content and very very few will stick with the project for long. Remember 2005-2006, the year of 5 entry blogs cluttering the Internet? Take a look around Wikispaces and see how many Wikis get started and go no where.

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