Posts Tagged ‘Google Wave’

SharePoint and Google Wave are two products that overlap in their stated purposes. While SharePoint has a much longer and more established history, as well as a larger user base, there has been speculation that Google Wave may give SharePoint a serious challenge. It can be worth taking a few minutes to look at each of these applications, and compare how exactly one compares with the other.
It’s important, first, to understand what SharePoint is and what it can do. SharePoint is a collaboration and communications platform that utilizes many different Microsoft technologies, integrating technologies such as Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office applications. SharePoint allows organizations to create sites that group information and documents together so that users can share information in a secure and efficient way. SharePoint also has a number of other features and abilities, from things like version management to custom site design.
Google Wave also is a collaboration tool. Google Wave combines several different web-based concepts and puts them together into a specific product and platform. It combines email, instant messaging, wikis and blogs. It allows users to have real-time messaging conversations, and to store those conversations.
However, Google Wave isn’t, and doesn’t pretend to be, a complete and full replacement for SharePoint. Google Wave, in the most basic sense, isn’t really a full-fledged, feature-rich collaboration platform. Google Wave, instead, is more of an email client with many interesting, useful and new features that haven’t been seen in email previously. It is an exciting and innovative email client, to be sure, but it doesn’t offer the versatility that SharePoint offers.
In many ways, it isn’t entirely appropriate to compare SharePoint and Google Wave. Instead, Google Wave more realistically compares to Microsoft Outlook. Google Wave doesn’t include things like document management, content management, dashboards, workflow management and data integration. SharePoint does include all of those things, and those features are largely what defines SharePoint as a collaboration platform.
To truly compare SharePoint and Google Wave, Google would have to take a step back and integrate several of their products. For example, if Google were to integrate their Google Wave product along with their calendaring application, Google Sites and Google Gears, they would come close to having a true collaboration management platform.
There is some speculation that Google Wave will, eventually, replace Gmail as a web-based email application. In contrast, SharePoint doesn’t have those sorts of ambitions. SharePoint knows what it does best, and sticks to those core competencies.

If you haven’t already heard about the Wave (not the ocean wave but “Google’s Wave”) then have a look at this video

Google Wave combines the functionality of LinkedIn, messenger, emails, doc management system, face book. It looks great on the video. For developers it’s a good opportunities to start building applications (pretty much like iphone apps). So if you already have an Iphone app you should consider building something for Wave.
Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group said, “Wave represents an effort to displace Microsoft entirely, but has a higher probability of failing completely and is also consistent with Google’s strategy with apps.” See full article by Jennifer LeClaire

How does Google compete with SharePoint, only time will tell - but it seems like Wave is more for internet users then for intranet users. Wave is very user friendly and pretty but SharePoint is tidy in a sense that you can organize documents in a folder while wave is more focused on information flow.

There are lots of questions and issues regarding Wave that needs answering eg
•    What are the security policies and how to enforce them in Wave?
•    How a company implement Wave?
•    Can businesses have local deployment?

From my experience companies and business are reluctant to put information on the net. It will take businesses a long time to adapt technologies like wave. People are still struggling to adapt SharePoint and trying to get rid of “Reply All”, CC and BCC.

So time will tell how this ‘Wave’ of technology is going to affect us… Hopefully in a productive way.