Bob Ives published an overview of Webex Connect and it looks like SharePoint Online and other soon to be released Microsoft-hosted collaboration tools are going to face pretty tough competition from Cisco.

Feature-to-feature both companies are offering a very similar set of technologies: messaging, presence, document sharing, web meetings. So what’s the difference?

It looks like the companies took vastly different approaches. Microsoft (as it seems – the product has not been released yet) basically took their existing Exchange, SharePoint and LiveMeeting servers, and can now host them for you in their datacenter.

These are more or less the same products you would use today with on-premise deployments, except that instead of your corporate Active Directory identities you would have a set of Live IDs forming your corporate directory in the cloud, which you can set to automatically sync with AD (no password sync though – users need to run a sign-in utility on their computers if they don’t want to type in the credentials manually).

This means that basically, the main value proposition is that you get Microsoft to run the servers for you and save on the administration costs. However, the services are still targeted at the use within your company.

Cisco (which owns Webex) seems to be forming the suite from another side. They took Webex as a foundation and added persistent team collaboration to it. So from what I can say, their suite is going to be more integrated and far better suited to external collaboration.

How easy is it to invite someone not working for your company to your SharePoint? Almost impossible. ADFS was supposed to be the answer but never took off, and your IT has to figure out a way to create and maintain accounts for all external users – which is a huge headache. SharePoint Online does not seem to have any changes to make it work across the enterprise boundaries any better than its on-premise cousin.

By contrast, how easy is it to invite someone external to your Webex meeting? A piece of cake! You just need to type in the email address. From Webex Connect information posted on the Cisco site it seems that this approach will now work for all the other functionality at Webex Connect. Which means that business owners will now be able to easily invite their partners to their project site – isn’t it the way online collaboration should be?

Again, we will obviously have to wait and see what the Microsoft’s final solution will be but from what we know today it looks like Microsoft’s early corporate success and enterprise-oriented identity system is now holding them in the new era of cross-business online collaboration.

You can get a demo of Microsoft’s solution here and on Webex Connect here.

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Business Productivity Online Suite, Cisco, Exchange, Identity Management, LiveMeeting, Microsoft, Microsoft Online, SaaS, SharePoint, Team Collaboration, Webex, Webex Connect
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