Much has been writ­ten about Open Office and about MS’s OOXML and the bat­tle for open file format’s. How­ever it looks as if Share­point could be a big­ger threat than any of these.

MS is push­ing Share­point through its chan­nel part­ners as an ongo­ing rev­enue stream and Ballmer calls it ‘The next big oper­at­ing sys­tem’. MS may be strug­gling with file for­mat lock-in but Share­point is Con­tent Lock-In and it doesn’t mat­ter what the under­ly­ing files in the store are if MS holds the key to the pro­pri­etary stor­age then the file type is irrel­e­vant. Share­point needs Win­dows to work, and MSSQL server to work, and IIS to work and Office to work so once Share­point get embed­ded every­thing else is sucked through auto­mat­i­cally, hence the rev­enue stream to MS and to Part­ners. There are open source alter­na­tives such as Mag­no­lia and Alfresco that put the cus­tomer in con­trol by using open stan­dards repositories.

As Matt Assay says in his con­clu­sion “But one way or another, pro­pri­etary and open-source com­pa­nies need an answer to Share­Point. Small won­der, then, that Ora­cle has been build­ing out its con­tent man­age­ment capa­bil­i­ties, as have IBM and oth­ers. Con­tent is the cen­ter of the enter­prise ecosys­tem, when all is said and done. Share­Point is Microsoft’s answer for con­trol­ling the next decade of IT”

Above gleaned from var­i­ous arti­cles as well as my expe­ri­ence installing and pro­gram­ming Share­point see Mary jo Foley at ZDNet for starters.

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