The Business Intelligence Blog

From RedmondMag article on Microsoft’s Sharepoint

Financially, SharePoint represents a big plus in Microsoft’s product stack. The SharePoint 2007 product generated $800 million in revenues in Microsoft’s fiscal-year 2007, Creese said. That figure is $50 million more than the total revenue generated by Salesforce.com — a hosted customer relationship management solution provider — in its fiscal-year 2008, he added.

Creese offered a caveat for organizations expecting SharePoint to work right out of the box. The solution may require some customization to meet an organization’s needs.

“SharePoint has been a huge success in the market,” Creese said. “However, what we’re starting to find is that a high-tuned SharePoint installation requires custom coding and third-party” support, including perhaps third-party software.

This is probably very evident as more and more corporations move to Sharepoint. Sharepoint is sort-of becoming the ubiquitous tool for Enterprise Content Management . The biggest advantage that Microsoft has with Sharepoint is that they serve as repositories for documents, which are created using their own flagship product, MS-Office.

Having worked with Sharepoint in the last three+ years, it has proved to be a great tool and it still has huge opportunities for improvement. And as the article rightly points out, its a wake-up call for Lotus Notes. I’m sure Lotus Notes engineers are burning enough midnight oil to pull up their market share. Read more at Computer World -

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 is the fastest growing product in the company’s history and seems to have as many uses as a Swiss Army knife. Its six focus areas are collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management (ECM), business process management and business intelligence. (Compare collaboration products.)

Just last month, Microsoft added a hosted alternative to fuel adoption. There is a “perfect storm,” observers say, around SharePoint in terms of the popularity of Web-based computing, demand for less-expensive ECM and portal tools, collaboration technology and integration around Microsoft’s Office suite.