Cap Gemini teams with Google Apps
I think this is big news...
"Google has linked up with IT consultancy and outsourcing specialist CapGemini to target corporate customers with its range of desktop (er, web) applications, in the search engine's most direct move against the dominance of Microsoft."
The Guardian has the rejigged press release, and Nick Carr has more detail.
I've just posted a fairly long post about this on Participo; I'll pull out some of my key points that I think are pertinent to where I see relevance to ThinkFold.
Massive growth in collaborating outside of the Outlook address book
The ability to collaborate 'outside of the Exchange group' is starting to become a real issue. I see this with clients who've outsourced key business processes, and then hit a wall when it comes to meaningful collaboration with these companies.
More nuanced, 'brainstorming' requirement between employees, partners
Hosting spreadsheets and word processing 'between' these organisational groups is an obvious solution - but that focuses on the 'paper shuffling' bit of the process, what about the less structured, but critical brainstorming and idea generation phase? Being able to rapidly share and manage notes from calls, structure ideas and share initial plans is where I think ThinkFold sits...drop me a line if you agree :-)
Why it might be too late for Google
I've realised that Microsoft's knowledge sharing/collaboration strategy pitch with SharePoint, is to maintain the paradigm of document (i.e. Office file) creation. That makes sense if maintaining the Office suite and Exchange is a massive cash cow (which it is, for MS).
But as an employee, if I'm going to share my documents through the web, I might as well make them web pages? Physical Office has less and less relevance for me, both as a place and a software suite.I've gone into more depth about the demise of tradtional IT and th si shift to pages vs. files over in the original post.