Capitalizing on Collaboration: Microsoft?s Collaboration Strategy
This is part of an excellent article that anyone thinking about collaboration space should read. Bottom line, Microsoft is currently missing the boat and paddling madly to get in the race. The author mentions SharePoint, LiveMeeting (aka PlaceWare) Outlook, NetMeeting, and Groove as parts of a Microsoft collaboration portfolio, but they are just that…parts. For a small business that's a lot of investment in time, money, and hardware to pull it all together.
Of course, what Microsoft will do, as it often does, is to target the companies with the best technologies and either copy it shamelessly or buy out the company. Once Microsoft gets its eye on the ball we'll all be using it's collaboration tool, and probably having a love/hate relationship with it too.
“The Goliath of Redmond has a simple mantra: Control the operating system and you control destiny. Indeed, Microsoft’s hegemony allows it to set the agenda – on desktops and servers, at least. But the company’s taste for monopoly over innovation has attracted a host of persistent Davids” (Wired, June 2004)
A change is underway in how businesses collaborate, accelerated by demands for new technology that links teams, shares data across the firewall and across borders, and integrates back office systems. Industries already served by the various collaboration technologies, including product data management (PDM), knowledge management (KM), and change management (CM) systems have begun to see parallels between the applicability of these disparate systems, and are investigating ways to bridge these tools and systems together.
· Enterprise Application Integration
Already a key initiative at Microsoft, seamless integration of applications should remain a key priority. But more importantly, Microsoft should offer more options for communicating data with disparate systems. BizTalk Server is a critical piece of this architecture.
· Team-Based Collaboration
SharePoint Server is headed down the right path, but what is needed is PDM-lite; a secure team workspace for document sharing, ad hoc web meetings, and basic workflow creation and assignment capabilities. Build an environment through which individuals or teams can collaborate with outside vendors and partners on the fly, without having to make them permanent members of the workspace or have them go through stringent corporate security measures – all within a secure, flexible platform.
· Project Portfolio Management
Personally, I believe Microsoft Project needs to be taken back to formula – Microsoft should re-architect the application for the team, modeling it after the web-based offerings that dominate this space. Microsoft needs to begin thinking about projects not as standalone efforts, but as components of a larger effort (a multi-project “program” or as part of a product or business unit). Unless you can see across multiple projects, you can't improve the overall program or business unit. Until you have visibility of efficiencies across multiple programs or business units, you can't improve your product. Without visibility of what is actually happening with your product, you won't truly understand the impacts of market changes to your overall business.
Conclusion
Microsoft believes that real-time collaboration will someday become as widespread among businesses as email. With the dramatic increase in online meetings, B2B communication vendors, and collaborative application vendors, it is clear that this is the future of business. Still, Microsoft must take steps to clarify its collaboration strategy and roadmap if it hopes to attract the customers it expects, especially in the SMB market.
Microsoft needs to hire people who understand the intricacies of knowledge management and team collaboration, and to clarify their vision for an integrated solution.
With a solid roadmap and tight integration into standard Microsoft applications, Microsoft will dominate.
