I think the fact that Sharepoint isn’t the be-all-end-all solution is what is attracting partners. If MS keeps those opportunities open we’ll see a healthy community build around it and that’s good for everyone.

I’ve just kicked Sharepoint off a deal in favour of other technology, Microsoft based but way ahead of where MSFT is at. I can tell you exactly how far ahead. 3 years. Because that’s when MSFT said they’d have the features that exist in the selected solution.

I don’t doubt they’ll be an important player and may over time become the pre-eminent player. But they’ve got a lot to do. Simply waving ‘standard’ in from of people won’t be enough.

It may take some imagination to see Microsoft as the “Facebook of the Enterprise” today but that’s partly because a lot of the discussion about Enterprise 2.0 is still pretty concentrated in places like Silicon Valley and Boston.

My company has been selling an Enterprise Wiki based on the Microsoft stack for the last couple of years and even though it didn’t win us a lot of points early on we’re really starting to see that decision pay off. For example, being built with Microsoft tools makes it easy do things like instantly convert a Word document into a wiki page.

I would expect NewsGator is probably seeing a similar dynamic were their Microsoft centric approach made them a bit un-cool in certain circles but could be a smart decision in the long run.

I talked to a couple of Microsoft people at the Enterprise 2.0 conference and even though a lot of their arguments centered around why you need a unified social networking platform from one big vendor (namely Microsoft) instead of a “best of breed” Enterprise 2.0 products it seemed to me they had seriously integrated many of the Enterprise 2.0 concepts into their approach. Which was in contrast to many of the other large traditional big players at the conference who basically took their existing slide shows and changed some of the titles to “Enterprise 2.0”.