Microsoft still a collaboration lightweight

Will Microsoft manage to muscle into the collaboration space like it has so many markets? Perhaps in the long run. But first its strategy and products need some fine-tuning, says Simon Marshall.

Read more stories on collaboration in silicon.com's special report.

Despite appearances, Microsoft has been a player in the collaboration marketplace for years thanks to its email clients and server platforms. But of late, it's been trying to make inroads into the wider collaboration space with new technologies designed to push messaging, conferencing and portals into the mainstream.

It would be too easy to suggest that this is another Microsoft exercise in customer lock-in as it diversifies to avoid stagnation in its traditional markets. After all, it seems pretty clear that enterprises that already own Microsoft infrastructure would want to consider wider collaborative options. Still, it seems the company has some way to go to convince even this captive market of its neophyte talents.

Admittedly, the Redmond giant has not had the luxury of its competitors, such as IBM, Novell and Oracle, in being able to construct a suite of collaborative solutions from the ground up. This is not to impute a lack of utility; far from it, as Microsoft's vast Exchange, Outlook and Instant Messenger (IM) installed bases testify. But it does mean that when it comes to explaining its collaborative strategy to the market, it may as well be doing so in Visual Basic.

"Throughout its investment in the collaboration market, it does not have a collaborative strategy as such and its [position] has accreted almost by accident," says Meta Group analyst Ashim Pal. As a result of apparently trying to shoehorn legacy products into a rapidly developing collaboration space, Pal suggests that its market message is unclear.

"It would take them so little to deal with this but Microsoft is not good at positioning products as part of solution sets and defining what the relative acceptable usage of those products is," he says.

One glance at Microsoft's somewhat Byzantine website seems to confirm this, but its offerings can at least be simplified into two categories: real-time and non-real-time tools.

The non-real-time tools centre on the company's SharePoint family of servers and services, which in turn fall under the Windows Server 2003 umbrella and include Project Server 2003. The focus here is on creating workspaces for people to collaborate on projects in their own time by crafting websites and portals. Office 2003 applications can also be used as places to interact within this framework.

Microsoft's real-time tools have their origin in the workhorse Office suite as well, but its new Office System, launched by Bill Gates in New York last October, goes further by building in IM capabilities. Here, Live Communications Server 2003 acts as the foundation for web, video and IM conferencing (supported by SIP), which helps users discover where contacts are located and if they're available.

"Collaboration is certainly one of the hardest things to communicate because it means different things to different people," says Darren Strange, service line practice manager for Microsoft's collaboration technologies. "It's tricky to change what people understand by the word 'Office', and it's hard for us to get across that we're not talking about Office applications, but the collaborative Office environment."

Explaining that your old dog now does new tricks is one thing, especially as a number of related market spaces, such as portals, content management and productivity applications begin to blur. But it's another to ask: Does it do those new tricks well?

"Microsoft is finally building out a set of products that have the beginnings of enough functionality and collaboration is starting to become embedded into business process," says Meta Group's Pal.

Embedding collaboration in processes is happening in the pharmaceutical, petrochemical and general consultancy and manufacturing sectors as companies use collaboration to directly solve problems, rather than because it provides inherent benefits. This indicates that collaboration is yet to go mainstream, something that may be reflected in the relative immaturity of some of Microsoft's products, starting with its non-real-time offerings.

"SharePoint, right now, is great for small groups but it is not a full enterprise application yet," opines Dan French, president of enterprise collaboration solution provider Intraspect Europe, acquired by Vignette last December. He says, too, that SharePoint is part portal, part collaboration tool, and as such may be diluting its ability to compete against the best in either field.

David Turner, an international marketing manager for Microsoft Gold partner the Coda Group, disagrees.

"We were quite sceptical at the outset and thought that Microsoft might not be robust enough for big enterprises, but I think they've cracked that," he says. "For example, it has put in functions such as better backup for Office applications at the SharePoint Server end as more documents are shared."

Microsoft is certainly encouraging enterprises to kick the tyres themselves, because SharePoint is free to customers who have Windows Server. The Coda Group has developed a collaborative accountancy service based on SharePoint that enables its customers to chase information at the end of each month in line with new compliance regulations.