Microsoft is the Mother Ship of Collaboration
Microsoft, compared to its collaboration peers,
Oracle, VMware, HP and Google, seems to move at a
slow and steady pace. However, slow movement doesn’t
always mean it is not without calculation. With a
seven-year migration from desktop to web, Microsoft
Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 business
productivity tools will be offered on the cloud,
which means complete and utter domination by the
Mother Ship, a.k.a. Microsoft. Microsoft’s loyal
customers will be able to access their work at work
or on the web anywhere, anytime providing concurrent
and seamless collaboration.
The key to their web dominance is Microsoft’s
alignment of three of their proprietary code and
document formatting technologies: Open XML as the
document format, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
as the document model and Sliverlight as the runtime
engine for the web. With these golden three,
customers can easily move from desktop to the web to
desktop again, moving and sharing documents, using
SharePoint 2010 as their collaboration server.
What makes this such a smart move? Web
collaboration tools from Google, Cisco and EMC
cannot properly edit Open XML documents because they
do not use Open XML. Open XML is an open document
file format for saving and exchanging editable
office documents, which mean Microsoft documents
have invisible instructions embedded within their
code that allows certain users access to data sets,
run certain database queries and not others. For
example, a chart being viewed by a team through an
online wiki can be updated in real time even when
the data in the corresponding spreadsheet is sitting
somewhere on a desktop of the SharePoint server.
Because most business documents have been created by
a Microsoft program, a business would essentially
have to reinvent the wheel in order to switch to a
competing document editing product.
Of course, Google has not come without a fight.
Using HTML5 as the backbone for their very own
online collaboration tools is truly betting against
the fact that businesses will continue to use legacy
documents with Open XML coding. However, with
billions of business documents that depend on
Microsoft’s Open XML to render their business
process, why would anyone switch? Google’s stance on
the matter is you can convert anything. However,
converting Open XML documents will break the code in
the process, hence breaking your entire business
process. According to many open source developers,
Microsoft’s 7 years of migration from desktop to
web, has paid off, with Microsoft being the only
vendor right now to pull off this type of
interoperability, seamlessly.
Whether Google fans would like to admit it or
not, the world uses Microsoft and will continue to
use Microsoft in their business processes.
Ultimately, what Microsoft has succeeded in doing is
taking in-office collaboration to the web and making
it available anywhere without breaking those
processes that make its applications so powerful to
their end users.
To hear more about SharePoint 2010, attend PC
Professional’s Catch a Wave Seminar Series:
When: April 1, 2010 9:30 am – 2:00 pm
Where: PC Professional Headquarters, 1615 Webster
Street, Oakland, CA |
