CIOL: What are the major trends that you are seeing in enterprise collaboration space?

SM:  The foremost trend leading enterprise collaboration is the increasing adoption of social computing (blogs, wikis, RSS, mashups) within enterprises. Web 2.0 is now delivering substantial business value around collaboration and productivity and has reached the 2008 priority list for many enterprises.

CIOL: Coming  back to MOSS What benefits does the integration of MOSS 2007 with Microsoft's Unified Communications stack accrue to user?

SM:Users find exceptional value in SharePoint’s tight integration with Microsoft’s Unified Communications technologies and with Microsoft Office productivity applications. When using Office Communicator, a user can see whether a co-worker is online and their status (via “Presence”) – whether they are busy, in a meeting or free. 

Depending on this, they can communicate with them with a single click, choosing the optimal option – click-to-call, chat or email. This Presence information is readily available everywhere – on a SharePoint collaboration site, within an email or calendar item in Outlook or in the Office Communicator client – making interactions extremely effective and efficient. This works to increase employee productivity and responsiveness to external clients.

CIOL: A word on the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint. How does it benefit the enterprise customer?

SM: Podcasting Kit for SharePoint - one of the capabilities through which Microsoft is helping customers accelerate the adoption of Social Networking in their organization. PKS facilitates easy content contribution, rich tagging/rating/commentary of content, the ability to attach important ancillary content, provides rich media web viewing of the content (Like a ‘YouTube” for the Enterprise), individual downloads, subscriptions, rich search of content, and much more. With this freely available kit, partners and customers can add podcasting capabilities to their MOSS 2007 portals.

CIOL: Which verticals are you seeing maximum traction?

SM: In India, while ITES companies were among the earliest adopters and have some of the biggest implementations of SharePoint, we have seen great traction in other verticals such as banking and financial services, manufacturing, the airline industry as well as professional services organizations. These businesses are heavily knowledge and information driven, and improving collaboration, streamlining processes and increasing business visibility are becoming competitive necessities.

 idhriesa@cybermedia.co.in 

CIOL: Brief us about number of licenses sold, number of customers and revenues accrued by MS SharePoint globally. An overview of Indian figures will be appreciated. How many customers have you in India and how many are you targeting in the next two years.