Microsoft Goes All The Way With Social Business in Sharepoint

After spending last week digging in to SAPs focus on bringing Social Business Design inside the enterprise, I came to the Sharepoint conference to watch Microsoft unveil Sharepoint 2010 and to find out just how social the future of Microsoft might be.

You are probably aware of how big Sharepoint has become (over 100 million seats), and how fast it has grown (the first business inside Microsoft to grow to $1billion, growing 20+% year over year), but one of the unknowns until now has been: Will Sharepoint become a true Social Business platform?

The answer just might be yes, but the key word here is “platform.”

Sharepoint is a product that is truly what you make of it, and has always been more platform than simple product. Companies who invested in proper customization and integration have been able to benefit from it much more than organizations who simply deployed Sharepoint and made it available out of the box.

Sharepoint 2010 is much more usable out of the box. The new ribbon interface is intuitive and familiar to Office users, and the product is much tighter, but the need for customization and integration remains. Luckily, Sharepoint 2010 is more focused than ever on being a platform for developers.

Sharepoint could not have taken a bigger leap towards social computing and collaboration in Sharepoint 2010. In particular there have been major additions which represent the Dynamic Signal (Activity Streams) and Metafilter (Social Tagging) components of our Social Business architecture. Not only are these archetypes strongly reinforced in Sharepoint 2010, but they are readily integrated across a series of products and into ERP suites. I will talk about that more in a series of future posts.

If you have any questions about 2010 you would like me to address in the next few days, leave a comment and I will do my best.