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"Let's take Office as an example. Does anyone seriously think that it will still enjoy network effects five years from now?" Absolutely. Office isn't going an

• WiseWeasel 16y ago
  Considering where OpenOffice.org is today, and the use it's already getting in small companies and even various government departments around the world, it would not be hard to imagine it making a very significant dent in Office profits for Microsoft over the next five years. That's not even getting into the cloud options, however successful those turn out to be on the corporate desktop. Off-topic, anyone know of a good open source web-based office suite project? It would be nice to have the collaboration benefits of web-based productivity software run from a centralized location, combined with the data security of being hosted on private equipment on the LAN.
• ShabbyDoo 16y ago
  Has Sharepoint helped Microsoft preserve cross-organizational network effects? I perceive it to be used mostly as an intranet.
  • Encosia 16y ago
    Indirectly, yes. SharePoint integrates impressively well with Word and Excel, for version control and as a data store. Using Office with SharePoint definitely adds value in ways that Office replacements don't currently. In that way, SharePoint strengthens Office's hold on the desktop, which strengthens the resulting network effect.
• rbanffy 16y ago
  Oh boy... My wife led the project of her company's local branch intranet. She wanted to do it in Plone (probably my fault, as I introduced her to it), but central office demanded it to be done in Sharepoint because that's what they use. I feel sorry for the companies who use Sharepoint for its document sharing/management... In time, it will prove a huge competitive advantage for their competition.
  • zkmaster 16y ago
    SharePoint is a great intranet and collaboration product, but it's not a document management system. However, you can extend SharePoint with Laserfiche document management. Check it out on our site www.aisww.com or read more on our document management blog: blog.aisww.com
    • rbanffy 16y ago
      Was this spam? My whole point is that Sharepoint is not a great intranet and collaboration product. It's unnecessarily tied to Microsoft Office products (and it's that way by design), has simply appalling content management (why would I want to buy a second product from a second vendor to make what I bought bearable to use?). The point was that the Sharepoint intranet had half the functionality for twice the budget and twice the maintenance cost of the originally designed Plone-based solution.
      • zkmaster 16y ago
        Hi, No, its not spam. I don't know enough about the installation to be able to speak intelligently on the specifics of that project, but we have many clients that use SharePoint for intranets and collaboration while its not perfect for every situation that does not mean its not a good intranet/collaboration product. My point about extending SharePoint was that you said "I feel sorry for the companies who use Sharepoint for its document sharing/management" and I was addressing that by mentioning a product we use to fill that gap in SharePoint. There are many reasons for using SharePoint, there's no need for me to get into that here. If you need to add document management to SharePoint, Laserfiche is a nice easy way to do that.