The Connections Blog

I wish I could have been in Boston this week for the Enterprise2.0 conference, it sounds as though it has been a roaring success.

The opening morning of the conference saw the much-awaited IBM vs Microsoft (Connections vs Sharepoint) "bake off", with IBM's Suzanne Minassian and Heidi Votaw representing the blue side.  It appears that they did a great job:
C.G.Lynch in CIO magazine:

IBM and Microsoft showed off their social software for businesses at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston today in a three hour session meant to compare and contrast their offerings.

While both vendors showed their products could integrate with existing e-mail systems (especially e-mail systems that they sell, such as Notes and Exchange), IBMs Lotus Connections looked, at minimum, a year or more ahead of SharePoint in its social computing capabilities out of the box.

It was a lot prettier looking, too.

David Hobbie (works for a Sharepoint customer):

Lotus provides much richer set of information for users inside the firewall.

Compared to Microsoft, it looks a lot more user-friendly and easy to adopt. Microsoft is stronger in having so many partners and applications developers that are willing to invest in integrating with Sharepoint.

Lotus has really built out a fully mature social networking and collaboration system. Suzanne noted that the longer a social application is out there, the more data gets added to it and it also looks like the longer a social collaboration system has been published and actively modified, the more and better features it has.

Stephen Collins (AcidLabs - a social networking expert from Australia):

Microsoft lost audience during their presentation, which is a shame. SharePoint is powerful, but like a lot of other products from the company, its heavy-lifting and will be hard for regular, non-technical users to adopt without massive customisation by skilled technical implementers. I have no doubt that Connections is no different, but it didnt feel that way.

The 451 Group (Nick Patience and Kathleen Reidy - a web2.0 blog):

The first tutorial this morning at The Enterprise 2.0 show here in Boston was Social Computing Platforms: IBM and Microsoft. It was a duel of demos, not as open or back-and-forth a discussion as I'd hoped. But the general concession during the event and in the hallways afterwards was that Microsoft was showed up by IBM thoroughly.

The Lotus demo was first. Lotus Connections is just coming out in version 2.0 and has a fairly complete set of capabilities for social networking, bookmarking, tagging, communities and blogging. The UI is clean and modern and the presenter,  Suzanne Minnassian, did a great job sticking with her user scenario and showing how Connections can be used.

Then there was SharePoint. Microsoft SharePoint is of course lots of things - its a basic ECM product, its a portal and it has some nascent social computing features. But this demo was only to focus on those features, and theyre really not competition for Lotus Connections at this point. And just how nascent these features are was clearly evident this morning, in a demo that also included partner technologies and open source code. It was too technical and showed how difficult SharePoint can be to configure.

To be fair, comparing SharePoint and Connections is really not comparing apples to apples. SharePoint hasnt reached the level of market penetration it has because of its social software features.  Microsoft positions SharePoint as a platform and that partner technologies work better to customize it for specific verticals.  Theres some truth to this, but the story will no doubt change as SharePoint gets more social in future releases.

I met with a Rob Curry, a product manager for SharePoint, this afternoon. He wouldnt comment on specifics in the SharePoint road map but we can be pretty sure that the next version, expected as part of Office 14 late in 2009, will go much further down the social software path.  In the meantime, SharePoint is still a juggernaut.  Can IBM make some hay with its social software lead to stop that?

I have deliberately picked 4 independent views to post here, there are loads more posts I could link to on IBM blogs and others, but the general feeling is that Connections is a long way ahead of the MS proposition at this stage.  Well done to Heidi, Suzanne and the team!

By: Connections Blog | 0 Comments | On: 11 June 2008 05:18:27 | Tags:  ibm  lotus  microsoft  connections  sharepoint 

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