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A recent article by Mark Spellun at MIT Technology Review discusses the popularity of SharePoint in enterprises, and its relevance in the web era. Everybody has to take SharePoint seriously because of its unparalleled popularity and penetration in businesses - it is used by more than 100 million users across the globe. Talk about pros and cons aside, the credit of making collaboration mainstream largely goes to SharePoint. SharePoint's tremendous success can be attributed to the following factors: 1) It performs some basic tasks which are very important in businesses - share documents, search internal files, coördinate tasks, and send each other instant messages through a central portal. 2) It works well with other Microsoft products which are almost universally used - MS Word, MS Outlook 3) A basic version of SharePoint comes bundled free with popular Microsoft products. This is one of the most important factors in its incredible penetration. 4) SharePoint is incredibly customizable. Apart from its out of the box collaboration features, SharePoint can serve as a powerful application development platform. However, inspite of its power, SharePoint is not suitable for companies of all sizes. "If you don't have a good-sized IT shop, taking full advantage of a SharePoint server license can be difficult," adds Forrester Research analyst Rob Koplowitz. SharePoint is not known for having the best user experience, and taking full advantage of SharePoint might require additional IT effort and servers. This is not suitable for companies with a small or no IT department, and employees who are not tech experts. For this reason, smaller companies are turning towards cloud based "SharePoint alternatives" because they bring more functionality out of the box, and don't require any in-house IT investment. Even Microsoft recognizes this, and has been offering stripped down cloud versions of SharePoint for a couple of years.  However, although mainstream, collaboration software is still not utilized by a large chunk of companies. As more and more companies awaken to the benefits of collaboration software, it is to be seen who will rule the collaboration market of the future. Â
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