Posts Tagged ‘SharePoint Vs 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.