Seven Microsoft BizSpark companies were invited to Microsoft’s campus recently to spend time with SharePoint team members in order to better learn how they could integrate their particular service with the Microsoft business software. SharePoint, which provides companies with intranet sites, hosted file stores, online collaboration tools, process management functions, intranet search, and more, is often incorrectly positioned against these “software-as-a-service” type companies in an either/or scenario, as if you would have to pick one model or the other when looking for business collaboration technologies. In reality, there are plenty of companies that allow their software to layer on top of SharePoint to provide more advanced features or specialized functionality.
Among the companies who visited Microsoft at this “SocialFest” event, as it was called, were Cortex Intelligence, a data mining and sentiment analysis company, Calinda Software, an email message mapping tool, Confer, a communications platform for microblogging, status updates, and chat, Leverage Software, an email organization technology, Liaise, an email data extraction tool, and Loqu8, a data lookup tool.
However, the winner of the top prize was Huddle, a collaboration platform for file sharing and online meetings. Their creative entry into the competition was a technology that allows separate SharePoints from different companies to integrate with each other and collaborate even though each SharePoint site was behind a separate firewall. The content between both sites are synchronized while maintaining auditing, compliance, and identity management functions. Genius!
Image Credit: Huddle
