Is Microsoft’s Sharepoint Wiki Good Enough?

We did a briefing for Gartner today. A lot of the focus was on Confluence because next year Gartner is targeting collaboration, and technologies like wikis, to be one of the top two or three trends they will concentrate on. In addition to the primary purpose of these briefings — let Gartner learn about our products, these briefings give you an opportunity to ask the experts what they think. We asked Gartner what they thought about Sharepoint’s wiki.

Gartner said customers who decide to use Sharepoint’s wiki will not be asking “Is it the best?’, but instead will ask “Is it good enough?”. They added that the real wiki-minded people out there will not be happy with Sharepoint for a wiki. They also pointed out that big customers like Banks who want some degree of diversity in their technology will not want more from Microsoft. Customers who ask “is it good enough?” are the ones Microsoft will pick off.

I think Gartner is right on. Their point about some big customers wanting less dependence on Microsoft is interesting. You might think the pervailing principle is always to reduce vendors. Although this is a common objective with enterprise customers, there is a point at which too much is too much from one company. Now we’ll just wait and see if the Sharepoint wiki is even ‘good enough’.