LTech recently launched an application that automates migration from SharePoint to Google Apps. This is indicative of how lucerative it has now become for companies to move their collaboration from SharePoint to online alternatives. Companies are actually building businesses around facilitating the move!

Online SharePoint alternatives bring great benefits to small organizations. They get all of the functionality that is relevant to their context, in a simple, non expert solution without having to set up hardware or software. SharePoint on the other hand, is a powerful platform, but overkill for small businesses. Moreover is was designed for large enterprises which have the budgets to maintain in house servers and hire dedicated IT staff.

I recently came across an article on cmswatch about Google and SharePoint being an apples and oranges comparisin. According to the author, most of the solutions like Google Apps and HyperOffice which claim to be "SharePoint killers" dont deserve the tag, because they dont have most of the functionalities that SharePoint do. He has even listed out specifically the features that most of these "SharePoint killers" don't have:-

1) Personal spaces for workers

2) Business Social Networking

3) Enterprise Search

4) Application development

The author is right to an extent, since it is true that most of the web based "sharepoint killers" do not have these capabilities. But a fact remains, most companies, especially smaller ones, have no need for all these capabilities. They use SharePoint mostly for document management and remote collaboration. So most of these functions are wasted on smaller companies.

Moreover, SharePoint as a solution is complex and expensive, especially since it needs the setup of dedicated servers, and needs IT experts to run and maintain it.

Web based solutions on the other hand, are light weight, and have been developed around small business needs (document management, shared workspaces, group calendars, forums, wikis etc). The emphasis is on having a set of tools that small users can use right away with minimal or no training, with a certain degree of customizability. Moreover the cost is broken down in reasonable monthly instalments, and there is no need to set up dedicated servers and hire IT experts.

I know HyperOffice collaboration software well, and they have long positioned themselves as a "sharepoint alternative" (as opposed to a "SharePoint killer"). Apart from having the functions I mentioned above, they also have some of the capabilities that the cmswire author said diffrentiate SharePoint and its web based alternatives. HyperOffice has personal workspaces for each user, in addition to group workspaces. It may not be an application development platform, but its HyperBase database tool allows non experts to set up automated workflows for simple business tasks like lead tracking and customer orders.

In conclusion, I agree web based collaboration suites are not "SharePoint killers", but theyre definitely more suitable for the small business market.

Google recently added storage capabilities for "any file type" to Google Docs. Previously, users could only work with Google's web based productivity formats. This new feature allows users to store Word, Excel, Powerpoint or even music and video files on their Google Docs account. This latest development brings to end speculations rife in the tech media about Google intending to launch GDrive, a path breaking online storage service.

Although not as groundbreaking as expected, this new storage service seems to attempt to bring into the fold of Google Apps users, those business users which refuse to be tied only to Google's formats. Even previously, Google has started to make concessions to this market by adding synching for Microsoft Outlook, as well as adding the ability to convert Word documents into Google Docs.

But this new feature lacks document collaboration features, although ironically the word "collaboration" has been drummed in Google's announcements. Older collaboration software providers like HyperOffice complain that they have had Google Apps features for ages, but the tech media tends to term Google Apps' features "pathbreaking".

For example, as elaborated in HyperOffice's recent Google Apps blog entry, HyperOffice has had Outlook synchronization and online storage and collaboration features for years, only now introduced in Google.  

HyperOffice, the award winning company providing web based collaboration software to small businesses, recently launched a major upgrade to their collaboration suite. This is the biggest upgrade to the suite in its 10 year history. This latest development has gained a lot of traction from the online tech community, and is being seen as a major competitor in the small business collaboration arena, which also has solutions from Google, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco and Adobe.

Launched with a strong new message "geeks not required", the new version brings comprehensive functionality to small businesses including features for email, document collaboration, intranet and extranet workspaces,project management, workflows, online meetings, wikis and more. It is one of the most comprehensive collaboration suites in the small business market.

“Increasingly distributed teams are bombarded with new Web 2.0 tools that do one job well – for instance, just sharing calendars or documents, or web conferencing, project management, chatting, or tracking sales calls. But these are “point” products that leave SMBs struggling to manage multiple vendor relationships. In contrast, with HyperOffice, SMBs get all their collaboration and messaging needs – with one integrated suite of tools that makes collaboration simple.”, said Shahab Kaviani, VP Marketing at HyperOffice.

See a video of the new upgrade here:-

The phrase "collaboration software" was at the peripheries of business tech discussions only a few years ago, with a handful of players like HyperOffice, and recently introduced Google Apps. But since then, the collaboration space has exploded with such a force, that even those who saw this as a wave of the future, couldn't have anticipated the extent. 

Apart from numerous studies indicating at the growing adoption of collaboration technology within businesses, the number of big names making a beeline to enter this market gives you an idea of how hot the market is.

The last year has seen the following mega players enter the market - Microsoft BPOS (Microsoft), Lotus Live (IBM), Acrobat.com (Adobe), Google Wave (Google).

Apart from the fact that these solutions serve the universal and growing business need of "collaboration" it is hard to compare them, such is the variance of approaching the collaboration problem. A recent article on ebizQ called the "collaboration continuum" attempts to place all of these solutions in a single concetual framework. 

And if that wasnt enough, the last week itself saw three new players plunge into the collaboration market! These are WebEx Mail (Cisco), Chatter (Salesforce) and Pulse (Novell).

Boy it surely is getting crowded in here!