SharePoint Focus of Social Networking Plans

Web collaboration and enterprise social networking will be expanded in Microsoft’s business application strategy over the next five years. These technologies enable organizations to host Web sites for collaboration among employees, and between employees and business partners or customers. Compared to e-mail and file sharing, these solutions can make document and data sharing more efficient, improve targeting of communications, and promote stronger employee contacts and knowledge sharing. Microsoft’s architecture for these solutions centers on SharePoint and the Office suite, which will both probably evolve to work better with mobile devices, simplify external collaboration, and strengthen organizational control of content.

This report summarizes Web collaboration and enterprise social networking capabilities supported by Microsoft products, and the potential business benefits of those capabilities. It outlines Microsoft’s recommended system architecture for Web collaboration and enterprise social networking and identifies the most important variations on the architecture that customers have deployed. Finally, it summarizes likely priorities and possible future developments for Microsoft’s architecture and its components over the next five years.