Blogger: Craig Roth
It's been a while since my last blog post as I've been kept running all over Europe lately doing speaking (Domino Notes User's Group in Bremen) and visiting current and prospective clients in Munich, Copenhagen, Vienna, and London.
Now that I'm home I'm decompressing and reflecting on what I was hearing from the corporate and government organizations I talked to about collaboration and portals.
- I found a great deal of interest in social software, but the dozen or so organizations I spoke with seemed a bit further behind the U.S. in terms of awareness and piloting.
- There was quite a bit of SharePoint work going on, but generally in a more controlled fashion than I've seen in the U.S. SharePoint was frequently being stripped down to fit into the rest of the environment. To take a few examples, in one case it was being used as just a web file store. In another case it was just a low-end content management system. I prefer this approach to the whole-hog implementation that I see too often where Sharepoint steps on the toes of other installed infrastructure. Just because Sharepoint can do a lot of things doesn't mean it has to in your organization.
- Portals were a hot topic, with most organizations I visited using them, sometimes many of them. In fact, portal consolidation and governance is as big an issue as it was in my last few visits to Europe.
- Enterprise virtual worlds came up twice, without much prompting from me. One governmental agency was very interested in its use for rehearsal and disaster preparedness.
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