Can Microsoft Dominate the Portal Market?

Aberdeen Observations and Conclusions - by : http://www.aberdeen.com/
Microsoft has a major advantage in that the average user is already familiar with its desktop applications; thus, exposing documents and data to SharePoint’s collaborative environment becomes a relatively simple function which can be performed by the end-user from within the application itself.

While the IT department may argue that SharePoint’s feature-set is somewhat limited compared with some of its rivals and cite lack of J2EE compliance as a major shortcoming, the end-user community within the organization usually can’t wait for an enterprise-wide initiative when the task at hand appears to be straightforward.

By the time IT has a solution, there are already so many Microsoft-based portals in the organization, they cannot help but embrace the technology.

This strategy is made stronger by the fact that SharePoint can be sold into a company which is dominated by a competitor’s application suite.

Even though the likes of Oracle and SAP have portal solutions, a company that is heavily invested in their technology may still find itself compelled to use the SharePoint platform for outward-facing collaboration. The reverse is generally not true.

The only serious competitor using a "grassroots" adoption strategy is JBoss which, by virtue of its unbeatably low price point, could grab market share as companies continue to embrace the open source model more broadly.

However, with its upcoming release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft demonstrates its commitment to continue to add functionality and to embrace open standards.
Microsoft is positioned to dominate.

Great news for US, and all the user of MOSS ( you can read all the text format PDF )
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P. Erol GIRAUDY
www.clubsps.org