IBM Connections vs. Microsoft SharePoint:

Why SharePoint is not the right choice for social business?

1. It is not social

● Not designed in a people-centric fashion

● Limited focus on external relationships

● Lacks social analytics

2. It causes damaging proliferation

● Separate SharePoint deployments grow like weeds

● Encourages document duplication

● Causes significant governance and compliance challenges

3. It is designed to create vendor lock-in

● Office Suite integration is the focus

● No integration with non-Microsoft applications

● Hidden costs obscured by Enterprise Agreements/Select Agreements

Following are the further details on functional basis:

Integration and Interoperability:

Built on open standards and being a dedicated platform that is not dependent on the larger Lotus platform, the way that SharePoint depends on Office

IBM Connections can be easily integrated with MS SharePoint, Outlook and Office however the reverse is not possible

MS SharePoint 2010 uses a silo architecture and is file centric

Social Business: The new version of IBM's enterprise social networking software Lotus Connections features

widgets with social recommendations whereas SharePoint focused only on documents; not social at all. Even after acquiring Yammer which has multiple clients; it lacks full capabilities

Document Management:

There is no listing of all documents shared with the logged on user There is no listing of all public documents (the logged on user) have access to There is no easy way to share a document from "Personal Docs" to "Shared

Docs"

There is not Social metadata around documents like, who are interested in the document, is the document recommended, has it been download, who has recommended or downloaded it, and discussion around the document is missing

Users are unable to see each other’s tags and notes Not easy to navigate to SharePoint home screen File upload controls offers not functions to add social data There is not filtering capabilities to search for files

Files Management: File duplication – when adding files to a folder, Connections maintains one copy of the file and

simply shares the meta data. This allows files to be updated across all social contexts or folders without creating duplicate copies of the file. With SharePoint 2010, this same action makes physical copies of the file, so if you lose the “shared file” concept, and all the social context (tags, notes) are lost

File sharing – Connections tracks how and when a file is shared between people. As a file is shared, Connections will keep track of the extended network of sharing to see exactly who has the file across the whole enterprise. SharePoint does not track sharing of documents in the file’s properties view

Personal vs. shared documents – SharePoint maintains two libraries on your My Site – a personal library and a shared library. Sharing files consists of emailing links, changing permissions of the file, or moving documents from the personal library to the shared library. Connections maintains one library and controls sharing through a concrete “sharing” paradigm

Global view of shared documents – SharePoint does not have an aggregated view of all user’s shared files. Instead, one needs to navigate to each site to see the files. Connections has such a view where you can see all the files your own and share in one place

Tagging – Connections includes the ability to tag files and other users will find your public files using the tag (via the tag cloud or search). SharePoint also lets you tag files, however those tags are not visible to others

Mobility:

SharePoint portal can only be accessible from windows based mobile while IBM connections can be accessible from multiple mobile-OS platforms such as: Apple-iOS, Blackberry-RIM, Google-Android, and windows as well

Cost:

Licensing cost of SharePoint is much higher as compare the IBM connection because IBM offers different flavors (internet feature is core part of it) that suits to different size of organization while MS just came up with two offerings (Standard, Enterprise – internet is optional and has been charged separately)

Why Choose IBM Connections?

1. Market Leadership recognized by IDC, Gartner, & Forrester:

a. IBM is #1 in social software platforms (*IDC, "Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2011 Vendor Shares, Jun 2012, Doc # 235273, Gartner Magic Quadrant 2012)

b. 37% of Fortune 100 companies have IBM Social Collaboration Software

2. IBM Research & Innovation: