KMTALK ASIA

Microsoft and IBM are into the WAR!- the war to capture the enterprise portal market. This year both the companies have launched extra features to embed social networking functions more explicitly in their portal solutions. As identified by many, social networks are now the driver for fresh ideas, which leads to faster decision making, creativity and innovation. Both Microsoft and IBM are in the race-offering new Web 2.0 like features embedded in their portals.
 
SharePoint 2010 is considered by Microsoft as better, faster, and more secure processes. This new portal features not only the usual portal management but also enhanced users’ personal experiences by adding user tagging, content targeting, Facebook profile page like Mysites, multilingual support etc.

The new portal provides a developer dashboard to track performance of the pages, alerts based on events and also has a web analytic service.

The best part is the mobile connectivity- where users can access and view in full fidelity any site, web part or content using a host of mobile devices and microbrowers ( i.e. Nokia S60, Safari on Apple iPhone). 

Wikis in SPS 2010 are easier to edit and manage than before with support for rich media (multimedia players).

IBM’s Lotus is also after Enterprise knowledge solutions, with their new theme- Lotus Knows- what you need to know, IBM is offering a number of collaborative tools. These tools can be used individually or all together to create a holistic enterprise collaborative environment.  Lotus Live provides access to Lotus collaboration tools through browser.

Lotus Connections offers team to use social networking tools like discussion forums, file sharing and wikis. Connection also provides personal site, blog like Sharepoint’s MySite with tagging features. Lotus Sametime has unified telephony, online conferencing, file sharing etc.. Microsoft Communicator offers the same.

Lotus Quickr file library stores files securely online. Lotus has this IBM® Mashup Center, which helps to combine data feeds to create useful widgets and mashups and share them with colleagues.  

WebSphere Portal helps coworkers, partners and customers to access back-end data and applications through the web, anytime, anywhere.

IBM also offers Lotus Connection and Quickr to Blackberry client.

Question is – in this time of economic downturn, where companies consider KM as a lavish item to have in their corporate menu, how these two giants are going to meet their revenue goal?