Did anyone else notice Mary Jo’s SharePoint Wave 15 insights?
If the rumors are to be believed, SharePoint Wave 15 will include all sorts of fun “new” stuff – from an App store, to advanced rights management, even plans for a subscription model and great focus on hosting.
Well, welcome for the first tiny step towards the new reality. But psst: proprietary, closed application servers are sooooo un-cloudy you wouldn’t believe it. I mean, didn’t we tear down these walls some time ago? The interwebs are full of standards and open solutions for this, so what would be the advantage of using a closed platform, other than being locked in forever?
Cloud apps only work in the long run when they are open, or at least have open API’s (and that’s another argument). SharePoint may be nice, but Drupal, Alfresco and Open-Xchange are the open, de-facto web standards when it comes to portals, mail and collaboration – not the old-school, overly complex and proprietary stuff. We congratulate Microsoft for trying to catch up, but smart, cloud-knowledgeable customers know that the race is already over – and that race is open. Ruthlessly open.