There still is a lot of perception about Microsoft’s position in the field of Portal solutions and as a collaboration platform. Recently released research materials hopefully will help change this perception.
Gartner Group recently released the Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products, 2005 which clearly shows Microsoft’s position in this field :
Microsoft moves into the Leaders quadrant for the first time. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 continues to improve, and the Office franchise continues to grow. A key part of the Microsoft Office System, Windows SharePoint Services, is being widely adopted, which has created a pull-through effect for SharePoint Portal Server. Microsoft had the highest growth rate of all the portal product vendors during the past year.
The report can be downloaded from the Microsoft website here.
Also Forrester has released some interesting research material on the market for collaboration solutions. Here’s what Forrester has to say :
Microsoft emerges as an early collaboration platform leader. Trends in messaging server and broader collaboration platform deployments favored Microsoft in 2004.
Microsoft has also begun to establish a lead as a collaboration platform provider to ISVs. PLM vendor UGS and collaboration software vendor CorasWorks built the current generation of their collaboration products (UGS Teamcenter Community and CorasWorks Workplace Suite, respectively) on top of Microsoft WSS. System integrator Capgemini developed a healthcare portal solution on top of WSS and SharePoint Portal Server. Additionally, vendors like Groove Networks and SAP support WSS as a document repository. These ISVs have chosen wisely; within two or three years, SharePoint will be virtually everywhere — it will be used, at least in experiments or pilot mode, by most organizations that have rolled out Windows Server 2003.
The report can be downloaded from the Microsoft website here.
