Don't shun social networking: Microsoft 22 July, 2008 By Liam Lahey

PromoPipeline Exclusive Channel Promotions Find Out How You Can Make Money Today! ENROLL FREE! >> Underpromising William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Services: I Can See Clearly Now Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Cutting the margin so many times William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels The Sign of Success - High Maintenance William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Question for the Times: Build or Resell? Gary Bixler - AMD

Burney, Corel Corp.'s former CEO, joined Microsoft in 2004. He said Microsoft has seen a growing interest in the collaboration space due to a number of factors ranging from the threat of individual information overload to the shifting corporate landscape that has rapidly become more global in scope. To that end, a recent Forrester Research report stated 56 percent of North American and European enterprises consider Web 2.0 to be a priority in 2008 with the market expected to be worth $4.6 billion by 2013.

"It's up to the role of software to . . . simplify how people work with that information," he said. "Recall the weekend -- this magical time when you weren't connected to work and you could actually enjoy free time and that is no more . . . that also makes it imperative for collaboration tools to step in and give people back the personal time they once had."

Turning to perhaps a more valid perspective, Burney pointed to the influx of new, younger employees entering an organization as mature staff retires.

"Aging baby boomers are leaving organizations and being replaced by 'millennials' or what I call the 'thumb generation'," he added. "There's a recruitment issue here. As organizations look to recruit new people they need to have the tools for these millennials. They have a choice where to go to work and they'll go to the companies that have the tools that they're accustomed to using whether that's messaging or social networking."

Burney said Microsoft has seen a phenomenally high number of customers that are mostly staffed with older generations of workers where the corporate policy on social networking tools has rendered their usage taboo.

"When (a customer) bans wikis and I ask why, they say 'because anybody can write to it' which is interesting because that is its selling proposition," he said. "It's the whole point of the wiki and yet people who didn't grow up with that level of sharing and openness -- which is what it boils down to -- it's a scary proposition for them."

"As businesses look at collaboration tools and at the influx of millennials coming into the organization they need to create that bridge between the social networking tools or Web 2.0 applications and collaboration technologies," Burney said.

SharePoint does a good job of bridging that gap, he continued. Microsoft was optimistic about how SharePoint Server 2007 would be received in the industry when it unveiled the system last June. Burney said the vendor was "completely blown away" by the actual results.

"Since SharePoint was launched in 2001 we've now seen over 100 million licenses of the product. The revenue this year eclipsed $1 billion making it one of the fastest growing server businesses at Microsoft," he said. "The partner ecosystem is impressive as well . . . there are over 3,300 partners building on top of SharePoint today."

A common pain point for organizations in terms of adopting collaboration tools has to do with document management, said Peter Carson, founder and president of Microsoft Gold Partner Envision IT.

"The common pain point that we see from a collaboration perspective is document management . . . that point of view tends to resonate with most organizations."

Carson said Canadian Tire's SharePoint deployment was an internally-focused project that is now being farmed out to its 50,000 employees located at 473 stores nationwide.

"We're excited about going and building on the Web 2.0 experience; a lot of the richer user interfaces we're seeing in (Websites) such as Facebook feel more like a desktop application," he said. "That's some of the things we're starting to build on top of SharePoint."

Demetri Sophianopoulos, project manager, retail systems, Canadian Tire, added the retailer started out by building a portal (called the 'Home Office') on SharePoint Server 2003 that was used primarily by management at varying store locations. Now it wants to expand by way of launching a new portal accessible by all Canadian Tire employees across Canada built atop SharePoint Server 2007.

"That's the goal of this project, to focus all of the (different) communication channels into a single point of communication," he said. "We can control the information the stores see so we can prioritize and make it efficient and generally improve upon the time (employees) spend accessing communications from Home Office."