Thanks for the comment. I totally agree that you can’t discount Sharepoint’s potential as Microsoft refines and alters the underlying architecture. My point of view is that approaches to social networking necessarily require a social perspective informing choices about the information architecture underlying a platform. I also agree that the UI investment in any tool is a key driver for adoption, while I would add that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the organizational from the technical impediments to adoption.

Larry

I like the sociological perspective you bring to these tools. I think you make some good points about the potential pit falls of doing social networking with in the Sharepoint framework. I am a proponent of Sharepoint becuase of its web site content managment tools. It’s clear to me that social netowrking is not a core feature but more of an add on. Also, I never have high expectations for Microsoft’s first try at making a new tool. It seems to take them two or three releases to refine and new feature sets. Despite this I hope to make the most of what Sharepoint offers and augment what is lacking.

I have to disagree with your characterisation of Confluence as a great Wiki tool. We implimented it at my previous company and it was not adopted by anyone besides the team that implimented it. I’m sure it has a comprehensive feature set but it think it fails on the basis of user interface design. I think Jira has the same failing. Any apps that hopes to can wide scale adoption in the corporate arena needs to invest heavily in UI design. It’s not enough to have a spectacular feature if users are put off by the user interface.

Mike