Christian Buckley nicely disects Microsoft's strategy for collaboration in a long post in The Samaritan-Web Project. Microsoft is in fact poised to dominate this area and you can discern their emerging vision by looking at the assembly of collaborative applications available now. Web parts are used to augment the functionality of Sharepoint technologies and Microsoft Project; You can create a collaborative workspace to create new documents from with Word and Excel; Sharepoint includes a presense indicator through messanger; and LiveMeeting while siting outside the suite, fits in well with the functionality of the other apps. VoIP will be a critical requirement, but they already understand how to imbed Voice into applications, it is a small step to incorporate VoIP into the opreating system.
Read Capitalizing on Collaboration, it offers a good view into Microsoft's strategy.
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