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Where content meets technology

Feb 21, 2008

SharePoint Offered by Comcast?

I didn't see the press release so I was surprised when I opened up the latest piece of junk mail from Comcast (I couldn't resist the headline "Business Class TV" .... I still don't know what it means). Comcast is now offering hosted SharePoint and Outlook to their business cable internet subscribers. They are calling the bundle "Microsoft Communication Services" and I think it serves a nice niche of small companies trying to collaborate amongst themselves and with their clients. However, many companies have already solved this problem using the various Google applications, Basecamp, and ZOHO. One interesting difference is that applications like Google Docs, ZoHo, and the hosted wikis take users out of the Microsoft Office Suite while MOSS (for good reason) is tightly bound with Office. The reliance on Office is not so much of a problem for most companies today because they have standardized on the suite. But "Officeless" collaboration is clearly a vulnerability for Microsoft going into the future.