SM: IBM is a great company that has good products as well. However, the fact that MOSS is being chosen by a huge number of customers worldwide and in India clearly shows the strength and robustness of the offering. SharePoint is one of the most well performing products from Microsoft today providing a one-stop for all enterprise needs, which no other product in the market offers. 

Moreover, SharePoint offers many more features and integration points to its applications. Some of these features include among others , tight integration to the Microsoft Office platform and better out-of-the-box functionality for supporting business intelligence.

CIOL: IBM/Lotus also recently launched similar product called Quickr, and like Microsoft with Windows SharePoint Services, is giving users a free version to get started. How do you respond to this challenge?

SM: Since it’s newly launched, we will have to wait and see where this is headed. WSS has been around for a while and we have a huge customer base and robust partner ecosystem that can deploy and customize it. It will be interesting to see how Quickr integrates with existing IT infrastructures within companies and what kind of partner ecosystem is available to deliver that solution to customers. 

CIOL: How do you see enterprises and especially Indian enterprises waking up to social-computing tools and technologies?

SM: The need for social-computing tools is a natural extension of digital collaboration and is increasingly becoming incorporated into business productivity solutions. Today, we are witnessing that a lot of enterprise communication happen over ‘alternate’ mediums like blogs. Web 2.0 technologies are fast catching the fancy of an information worker.

Forrester expects to see strong growth of web 2.0 technologies as adoption of Web 2.0 tools in general continues to spread. We are working towards this trend by providing the social-computing solutions and platforms today in SharePoint Server that balance end-user empowerment without sacrificing IT control.

Mahindra & Mahindra uses the Wiki capabilities of SharePoint Server for sharing knowledge & learning within the organization. Employees, who are nominated to attend a training session or an event, create a new wiki page and consolidate and share their learning for other employees. It is a unique way to create and enhance corporate knowledge.