rebelutionary / 2.0

On Acting Decisively: Confluence + SharePoint Integration / 2007 Oct 17

“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” - Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Today we're making a big announcement and we think we're in good company.

Apple did it ten years ago...

"We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft must lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win Apple has to do a really good job." - Steve Jobs (see the video)

Novell did it last year...

"CIOs want to focus on their business, and they want their suppliers to focus on improving operating system interoperability." - Novell's Open Letter To The Community

Sun did it a few months ago...

"Does it signal a strategic shift inside of Sun? No - we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Running, virtualizing and supporting Windows opens doors." - Jonathan Schwartz

We're partnering with Microsoft and releasing the SharePoint Connector for Confluence.

(I've also recently had a haircut - losing a few inches off the shaggy locks and thus making me look a little less like Jonathan Schwartz - which is good - because today I must sound a lot more like him. As Jonathan said - "Remain calm"! )

What is it?

Microsoft is today announcing two strategic partners at the Web 2.0 conference today to add improved social computing capabilities to SharePoint.

We're thrilled to be one of those partners, the other is NewsGator with their neat new SocialSites.

The beta of the SharePoint Connector for Confluence is downloadable now. (One thing we're doing differently to Microsoft - come on, I'm allowed one small jab - this is not a vaporware announcement.)

Here's a screenie of it in operation - here showing a Confluence page (with dynamic charts and more funky things) embedded within SharePoint. Note the "Edit in Confluence" link - only if you have Edit permission of course - and "Confluence" tab in the top left.

And another showing a Word document, stored in a SharePoint document list, that's securely embedded in a Confluence wiki page via a macro, opened with a single click inside Microsoft Office and saved back to SharePoint. Neat!

The Connector allows you to leverage the best capabilities of each application from within the other:

• embed rich Confluence wiki pages within SharePoint with a single click to edit
• display lists of documents from SharePoint within Confluence with a single click to edit in Microsoft Office
• search across both applications, navigate between them seamlessly with single sign-on from Crowd

(read more in our new, funky, Panic-inspired feature tour)

Why do it?

One word: customers.

We've had a lot of customers ask us how to get Confluence and SharePoint to work together - today we're providing the answer. For example, Accenture is a huge customer of ours and a partner. They deploy both SharePoint and Confluence to their customers - they can continue to do that, but now they can integrate them, search across them and embed content between them.

With over over 4,100 enterprise customers, Confluence is no market minnow - but by comparison SharePoint has over 80 million deployed seats. That's a lot of opportunity.

I'd like to echo again what Steve said:

"We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft must lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win Apple has to do a really good job." - Steve Jobs (see the video)

Confluence often competes directly against SharePoint, but they can also be extremely complementary. As I said in my presentation, the wiki market at the moment is such that the competition is not so much from other wikis but from email, shared drives, intranets and the like. It's about upsizing the pizza rather than taking two slices.

We think for customers that use both SharePoint and Confluence (and there are a lot of those), this Connector will be fantastic.

Other Thoughts

Partnering with Microsoft makes most entrepreneurs quake in fear. To be honest we've actually found the process to be quite pleasant. We're avidly a Java shop through and through, but that never came up as an issue. Everyone we dealt with at Microsoft was more than helpful whether it be on a marketing and a technical level - and for that I must thank them.

Web services were the real winner here as the entire integration is made possible by the SOAP stacks in .Net and Java, and the ultimate pluggability of Confluence and SharePoint.

Further Reading

If you want to find out more, you can read our press release, Microsoft's press release, the Connector website, or just download it today.

If you're at the Web 2.0 conference, Jonathan and I will be demonstrating the Connector at the Microsoft booth quite a few times over the next few days.

Come say "G'day" and let me know your thoughts - good, bad or indifferent.

Updates

• Dennis Howlett scribed Microsoft does the Atlassian pogo dance - "Unlike the marketing partnerships we usually see, this one has genuine utility."
• Jeffrey nailed the headline in David Kisses Goliath and covers more background into how the deal came about
• Dan Farber wrote Atlassian, NewsGator hook into SharePoint - "By integrating with Atlassian and NewsGator Microsoft is building out SharePoint as a richer Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform."
• Richard wrote up the deal on ReadWriteWeb
• Robert Scoble blogged it - " Why do that? After all, Sharepoint has its own wiki service? Cause Atlassian's is better and Microsoft's customers were asking it to support Atlassian's." and posted a video of Jeffrey and I on PodTech

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