Today Microsoft is announcing two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. (from Read/Write Web)

I suppose this is pretty big news for Atlassian wiki customers, especially those that are using Microsoft SharePoint - single sign-on and cross-platform search can be pretty important in the enterprise world.  Plus the ability to embed Confluence (Atlassian’s wiki product) content into SharePoint pages and allowing Confluence users to edit SharePoint content directly are pretty big wins.  It could also be pretty innovative for large existing SharePoint customers who are interested in using wikis for collaboration.   I think it’s pretty well accepted that the built-in SharePoint wiki is horrible - I feel safe in saying it’s the least wiki-like wiki product I’ve ever had the displeasure of using.

From my standpoint, though, I’m not sure I see enough value in the additions to warrant moving to Confluence as a wiki, at least not for a small- to medium-sized business.  With pricing starting at $4000 for 500 users (about the size of ETC) it seems steep - even if you work in a solid Microsoft shop (as I do) and have to consider the additional support costs of running multiple platforms within a company (as we did when we started looking at other wikis), the ongoing ROI of a Confluence purchase seems out of balance for the wins.  Perhaps at a larger company, where there would be significantly more maintenance overhead, it might be worth it.

I don’t really get the NewsGator stuff, I’ll have to admit: SharePoint already supports RSS in lists (which is how almost all SharePoint content is organized), and at first glance the NewsGator stuff looks like it’s mostly social network-style gizmos and connections between users.  A lot of what they offer could be done (albeit not as slickly) without too much difficulty with built-in SharePoint objects.  The addition of tags is nice, but the $20,000 large enterprise price tag seems way out of whack with the value delivered.

via Scoble’s tweet

Update:

An email from Jon Silvers reminded me that I should point out that ETC doesn’t use SharePoint Server, but instead uses Windows SharePoint Services, the free-with-Windows-Server-2003 subset of the SharePoint Server features. Given that, we’re probably not the target market for Confluence or the Confluence connector.

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This just goes to show how out of touch with Rock history I am.

Back when I watched videos, one of my favorites was the video to the INXS song Mediate.  I liked INXS a lot at the time; their concert in Kansas City in 1988 remains one of the best I’ve seen (of the 2 dozen or so I’ve been to - yes, I’m lame).  If you don’t remember it (or never saw it), the video is the 2nd half of this video on YouTube.

Until I saw the Dylan - EVERYTHING EXCEPT COMPROMISE site (via  iclicknation via daniela barbosa as delivered by media 2.0 workgroup) site, and the accompanying video (also on YouTube), I had no idea that INXS had, um, “borrowed” the concept for that video (as well as the concept for the song itself).  In fact (and this would probably horrify my dad, who’s a big Dylan fan), Subterranean Homesick Blues is probably my favorite Dylan song.

Further Schlegel-Dylan trivia: I took my dad to see Dylan and Kris Kristofferson at the Filene Center at WolfTrap for his birthday in 1991.  It was a good concert, but mostly because of Kristofferson, who was surprisingly good.  Both Pop and I were disappointed in Dylan’s performance, which was without rapport with the audience and featured essentially unrecognizable renditions of Dylan classics - rhythms and syncopation so out of whack with what’s familiar as to force the listener to rely on the lyrics to recognize the song - which is a difficult proposition under the best of circumstances when it comes to Dylan’s singing. 

Also, my son’s new music teacher is having them learn about folk singers and Dylan was one of their subjects - my son seemed to like the song they learned (Blowin’ in the Wind, I think) and asked me if I liked Dylan.

“Sure,” I said, “who doesn’t?”