Is Bill Gates right? - Will SharePoint 2007 replace email

Is Bill Gates right? He said that the adoption of social networking-type applications within companies would drive the next generation of business software and growth. Collaborative technologies, which imitate popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, would become as ubiquitous in the workplace as Microsoft Office tools such as word processing and spreadsheets were in the 1980s and 1990s.

Gates was speaking to an audience of more than 100 chief executives at Microsoft's Redmond. Applications such as Microsoft's SharePoint Server, which allows employees to work collaboratively and share information in a Web-based format on corporate intranets, would likely come to replace email as the dominant form of corporate communications,

Gates said, as they are more efficient in allowing companies to delegate responsibility and accountability to a wider range of employees. "When we think about information that empowers people, we think about electronic mail," Gates said. "That form of communication is inefficient when you get to having to make decisions that include groups." Web-based collaborative software leads to "direct empowerment of end-users so it doesn't require the time delay and cost of getting things done," he said.

It's a nice idea and one that Gates would love to see happen I guess. It seems there is a view that SharePoint 2007 will become the default intranet platform just as Outlook did with email. But intranets are multiple services - rather than one service (as with email) - but there is already a decline in email use in my life through increasing use of  other tools - blog posts, facebook, twitter, IM, Skype.......and the list goes on. That said, email still remains solid in its role.......one to watch!

Comments

[Intranet Manager]

more than an academic debate, the talk seemed more like a sharepoint sales pitch to me. i dont think email can be done away with altogather. it is "push" communication rather than "pull" communication which intranets are. email may be replaced with facebook style "messaging" systems, but i dont see one on one messaging going away

[Nic Price]

I think Mr Gates must be off his rocker!

The only way his vision would work is if everything is running on one huge great version of sharepoint... ah... yes... ok.

For me these days, without email I'd be lost.

Since the proliferation of all these social networking type sites (and I include my experience with sharepoint in this), I use email more and more as my "hub"

And I'm using email as "pull" communication by subscribing to email alerts and updates from the various sites and services I'm a member and/or customer of.

Personalised aggregation pages are handy once I'm on the sites, but I need a nudge to remind me to go to them.

So a combination of email and RSS reader is what does it for me.

[Ephraim JF]

If SharePoint becomes our default we're all in trouble, and I think we could benefit from the 25,000 foot viewpoint here.

The major trend of web technologies is towards trying to replicate the environment of in-person interaction. Let's not assume that social networking represents the future. It is the current step in the path towards making electronic communication more fluid.

Web 2.0 tools and enterprise 2.0 environments are attempting to create the realtime communication and collaboration that happens when people work together in person, like in the old days. There is a long evolution to look forward to here, with the ultimate goal that technology mimics real life.

Regarding SharePoint, God help us! MOSS 2007 has a large feature set, but doesn't do anything really well. The out-of-the-box setup is not user-friendly and lacks optimal functionality. It is hard to skin and customize SharePoint to get it to work well for companies' real needs. SharePoint needs to be designed with better coding standards and a much stronger focus on usability.

If this mediocre platform represents our future, I'll start writing letters on paper again.

[samuel]

thank you for this technology