David Kisses Goliath: Confluence Connects to Microsoft SharePoint

We’ve integrated Confluence with Microsoft SharePoint. We found Microsoft incredibly like-minded in solving a huge customer problem.

Last June when meeting with customers and analysts, SharePoint came up in every meeting. “We have growing groups who love the wiki, and long standing users of Microsoft and now SharePoint. Help!”, customers asked, including Geoff Corb, IT Director at Johns Hopkins University.

When Microsoft approached us to ask us to integrate, it made perfect sense. Then the hard part started: we had to put some engineering muscle behind it. We found Microsoft wanting to solve the same problem: remove friction between our technologies. And we found Microsoft easy to work with. Their product managers and engineers and ours even got Accenture on the phone to test out the requirements. Accenture is a partner of both our companies, and a large user of Confluence, so their feedback was important.

Why did we do choose to do this? Foremost, to bridge groups of workers who prefer to work in different ways with different technology. Customers have multiple domains of work: wikis, office document/email, document management, blogs, IM, and more, yet want to use the best technologies.

As a software company, Atlassian also did this because Microsoft was motivated, and we expect other partnerships like this in the future, so Confluence is more open. Although Confluence has an open architecture and now rather large plugin library, we have not focused, until now on larger partnerships.

Today, we release the SharePoint Connector for Confluence which is by far the deepest integration of any wiki with SharePoint, and is a testament to the connectivity of the .Net and Java platforms. The Connector is available today with:

• Search: Users can search SharePoint and Confluence content together from one place.
• Content sharing: From within SharePoint, users can embed Confluence page contents allowing users to blend content.
• Linking: Within Confluence, users can access SharePoint document facilities. By including SharePoint lists and content within Confluence, users, in a single click, can edit Microsoft Office documents.
• Single Sign-On and Security: With one login, users can access both systems while seeing only what they have permission to view.

It didn’t escape us that Microsoft asked us with our Java product to integrate with SharePoint. I can only take that as a complement, and a recognition of our customer base.

Updates and Further Reading

• Robert Scoble visited to video Mike and me, and blogged it, ” Why do that? After all, Sharepoint has its own wiki service? Cause Atlassian’s is better and Microsoft’s customers were asking it to support Atlassian’s.”
• Richard McManus covered the partnerships with Atlassian and NewsGator.
• Dan Farber and Dennis Howlett gave it ZDnet coverage with Dennis having his often interesting edge.
• Mike wrote the most insightful post about the risks and tensions inherent in deciding to do this partnership.
• And the feature tour is here, and the sufficiently reviewed 🙂 press release.

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’.