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'Microsoft committed to social networking'

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW DELHI, INDIA: Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) has gained appreciable traction in the enterprise  market over the last few years.  As of FY 07 08, Microsoft has sold 100 million licenses for SharePoint generating sales of $1 billion worldwide. 

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The Microsoft figures point out17000 businesses use SharePoint to tackle their information management needs and to enable employees to collaborate with team members. In India SharePoint revenue have grown by 56% CAGR over the last 4 years and company has over 100 customers on MOSS 2007 in India.

However, analysts have been questioning MOSS capability to scale well in comparison with IBM Websphere. They have also raised doubts about social networking tools for Share Point, which analysts, opine are less advanced and quite uninspiring, when compared to social networking tools in enterprise today.

Idhries Ahmad of CIOL caught with Sanjay Manchanda, director, Microsoft business division, Microsoft India,Sanjay Manchanda, director, Microsoft Business Division (India) to put forward his side of story.

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Sanjay also talked in detail how Microsoft plans to ward threat from about the  IBM/Lotus and company plans to partner or acquire any other big social networking players to improve its social networking bouquet.

Sanjay also talks about trend of Indian enterprises waking up to social-computing tools and technologies.

CIOL: Can you pinpoint specific reasons as to why Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) has been received well by customers?. Please detail some features why enterprises should deploy MOSS 2007?.

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Sanjay Manchanda: We have seen tremendous response to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) which is an integrated platform for enterprise search, content management, business intelligence, collaboration and corporate portals. Today, these are critical parts of an enterprise’s IT infrastructure.

Customers not only like the ROI delivered by some of the out-of-box capabilities, but also the fact that MOSS is extensible and can be customized to meet specific business requirements, such as business process workflows or employee self-service portals.

The second important reason for rapid adoption of MOSS 2007 by customers is that users can easily access its functionality not only from a Web browser, but also seamlessly from Microsoft Office, which they use every day.

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The strength and completeness of MOSS 2007 has also been validated by industry analysts like Gartner, who have positioned Microsoft as a leader in their MQ for Horizontal Portals, Enterprise Content Management and Information Access Technology for 2008.  

SM: As of FY 07-08, Microsoft has sold a record 100 million licenses for SharePoint generating sales of $1 billion worldwide. 

Today, over 17,000 businesses use SharePoint to tackle their most pressing information management needs and to enable employees to collaborate with team members, search and create social networks for experts and corporate information, manage content and workflow, and leverage business insight to make better-informed decisions.

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In India, SharePoint revenue has grown by 56% CAGR over the last 4 years. We have over a 100 customers on MOSS 2007 including companies like TCS, Wipro, Cognizant, HCL Technologies, Patni Systems, Zensar Technologies, Chembur Nagrik bank, Mahindra & Mahindra and Larsen & Toubro etc.

 

CIOL:  How do you respond to the analysis that MS SharePoint does not scale well given the way it stores data in SQL Server? By contrast IBM Websphere does not have this problem. How do you plan to do away with this issue?

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SM: We have had several successful implementations that scale large enterprise requirements. In fact, a recent report by IDC found that 61 percent of users surveyed said they were deploying SharePoint enterprise-wide. Another 28 percent of those using SharePoint in departments today are expected to expand usage to the enterprise within the next 12 months.

One such company is Patni, where SharePoint is being used by more than 14,000 users. Similarly, in India, we have enterprise –wide users of SharePoint at companies like Wipro, Zensar, M&M, L&T with thousands of users. General Mills went live has migrated 1.5 million documents to MOSS 2007, with 1700 Web sites, almost 6,000 lists containing 1.2 million items, and more than 1.3 million documents.

Another good example is easyJet, Europe’s third-largest airline, who are deploying SharePoint Server 2007 across the enterprise to make sure everyone from the flight crew to baggage handlers work together in real time to ensure that 470 daily flights remained on schedule.

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CIOL: The social networking tools for Share Point, analysts, opine are less advanced and quite uninspiring, when compared to social networking tools in enterprise today. How do you respond to that judgment?

SM: SharePoint Server 2007, along with Microsoft UC and Microsoft Office provides a broad set of collaboration capabilities with several social networking features like people search, Mysites (personal web), blogs, wikis, extensible people profiles, RSS support, and discussion boards. 

This is further enhanced by Microsoft UC’s real-time communication capabilities that integrate seamlessly with SharePoint.  Instead of providing point social computing tools, SharePoint Server 2007 delivers a social computing platform, which can be extended.

Developers can further enhance these capabilities via XML Web Services, AJAX, collaborative workspaces and the Common Web Application Framework. Some of our notable customers using SharePoint for Social Networking include Viacom, Accenture, Ford, Bank of America, Pfizer, among others. Social networking capabilities will continue to be an area of significant focus and R&D for the next version. 

CIOL: Is MS planning to tie up or partner or acquire any other big social networking players to improve its social networking bouquet. If yes, by when. And if so, wouldn’t there be a clash of features. How do you envisage smooth integration of features and applications?

Microsoft is deeply committed to social networking and has a strong roadmap of technologies in this area. Our strategy is to continue to provide a robust platform for Social Networking through SharePoint and other technologies, while our partners extend these capabilities to meet some of the advanced requirements that our customers may have. We are also committed to providing an open source solutions to Social Networking through Codeplex.

 



CIOL: How do you see the threat from IBM/Lotus? What are the inherent benefits or advantages that you score over them?

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. 

 

 

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.

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