Clueless

The Ultimate Business Time-Saver

Gene Marks, 04.02.09, 02:45 PM EDT
It’s called collaboration software, and you should be using it.

If this article had appeared in Forbes just one day earlier, I would have thought it was a crafty April Fool’s joke.

A recent study of 600 resellers revealed a “high demand” for a collaboration-software program called SharePoint. Intrigued (and unconvinced), I conducted my own informal and unscientific survey of 25 of my clients and asked them: 1) if they had ever heard of SharePoint; 2) what it actually does.

Results: About 20% of the small-business owners I spoke to had heard of the product, and approximately 0% could describe what it actually does.

The author, a self-described techie, admits to not knowing social networking from a hole in the ground.

I don’t blame these guys. Even after 15 years in the technology business, I found myself at a loss to explain (let alone justify) these sorts of collaboration tools. Not that SharePoint is the only game in town: IBM ( IBM – news – people ), Oracle ( ORCL – news – people ), SAP ( SAP – news – people ), Sun Microsystems ( JAVA – news – people ) and others offer their own collaboration solutions.

There’s a handy-dandy glossary of social network terms you should know, lifted from O’Reilly without comment: Buddy List, Drupal, Flickr, IM, Jabber, Long Tail, Microformats, News Feed, OPML, Second Life….

If I were a business person who had never heard of social networking, I imagine I’d be more confused than ever after reading this piece in Forbes.

As for never having heard of SharePoint, known as ScarePoint to many of its users, read this post from Nancy White. Maybe I don’t really want to know.