Google Wave Threat to Microsoft SharePoint?
Google Wave is definitely an innovative way for collaboration and communication (C&C) for individuals. It’s still in initial stages of testing and is being tried out for personal use and informal chatting. Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS) as compared to Google Wave is a complete ECM product suite with many more features which are just not limited to C&C.
As stated by Google Wave team – Wave is LIVE and SHARED with equal parts of conversation and document with real-time; you can see edits and interact live. This is an advantage to say for now, as this feature was not available until yesterday, therefore, everyone is excited to use it, but remember PRIVACY is a big concern. If you observe any social site (Face book) or chat rooms, people are not very happy or open to disclose their identity or talk/express themselves openly, share their frank and free opinions in general (thanks to moral policing). If the comments are inappropriate, one would like to hide or delete the same from face book profile or chat thread. You can’t keep the negative and casual comments ON for everyone to view (even with private settings).
Secondly, thru Wave - you can see, what the other person is typing. Great! But, do you really want to have this feature? We all love to type fast – pour out what is there in our brain (which is real) but before clicking the send button, would like to read and verify what it means to other person, how he/she will perceive it, so we do corrections accordingly. The live typing feature of Wave may back-fire, especially for commercial communications. By this live typing feature, businesses are exposing themselves to legal complications. After all, businesses CAN NOT afford a legal notice in their mail box every other day!
If Google Wave wants to move from social to business collaboration mode; they need to enhance these C&C features with configurable authentication, security and access. For business communication and collaboration – emails and intranet based discussion forms will be the means and mode and they are closely tied with existing enterprise architecture and IT landscape.
By and large, Google Wave appears to be highly unstructured and cluttered, not ideal for business collaboration situations, which calls for a degree of structure and control. SharePoint on the other hand is an archetype structure, and hence suitable for large organizations.
To summarize, Google Wave is not a replacement solution against any ECM suite or SharePoint; in fact it complements it. For e.g. an Individual can network socially thru Wave and do business C&C thru ECM tools like MOSS. Both are different breed and have specific purpose to survive. SharePoint has been a formidable revenue engine for Microsoft, and a big reason for this success is that it's also a development platform around which Microsoft ISVs can develop their own vertically-oriented SharePoint add-ons. So it's possible Google simply wants to create an open-source collaboration platform alternative to SharePoint (it is definitely a sign of healthy competition!).
But for now, Google Wave merely represents a new level of innovation for collaboration, and something that works differently than existing offerings. As such, Solution Providers are of the opinion that Google Wave is more likely to motivate Microsoft to add more innovation to SharePoint than it is to grab market share from Microsoft. In parallel, Microsoft also needs to update their ECM suite MOSS 2007 (& Office 2010) to support APIs and Gadgets that are build for Wave to run smooth in SharePoint environment and adopt the best of both the worlds; if cannot innovate then take it from Google.
In conclusion, I am of the opinion that Google Wave is not likely to challenge any ECM Suite including Microsoft SharePoint anytime soon (similar views are expressed by other bloggers and industry experts). Although a consumer market is very fast to react and get excited at every new innovation, business markets are known to be very practical and cautious with wait and watch philosophy.
i have read your article really nice one because got good knowledge about Microsoft SharePoint.
Posted by: Offshore Software Development company India | Jan 25, 2010 at 12:32 PM