SharePoint and Social Computing
June 29, 2009
You will want to read “Social Computing in the Enterprise. Microsoft Vision for Business Leaders”. You can download the Microsoft white paper from the SharePoint Web site. What makes this paper most intriguing is that it plops into the gap between the hyperbole about social computing and the information I saw this week that most business executives don’t do Web logs or other types of social computing. You can get a general sense of this somewhat surprising state of affairs in Computerworld’s “Top CEOs Still Shunning Twitter, Facebook”.
I don’t think Microsoft wrote its white paper in response to the news that CEOs “shun Twitter”. I think Microsoft wants to position SharePoint as a social operating system. The white paper employs routine rhetorical methods to create a need for a SharePoint solution. SharePoint, by the way, is not positioned as complex. Other approaches are complex. See page 10 for more along this line:
This complexity makes it difficult to apply traditional structured project management and collaboration solutions. Social computing can help optimize the performance of teams by adding a dimension of unstructured collaboration. This provides a forum for cross-disciplinary dialogs and authentic, spontaneous conversations between people in previously isolated areas of the company that can expose best practices—and call attention to inefficiencies and duplication—more rapidly.
So, SharePoint as a social operating system. Two references to the word “search”. I wonder what happened to the potent relationship mapping tools in Fast ESP. Any thoughts?
Stephen Arnold, June 28, 2009
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