Atlassian, NewsGator hook into SharePoint

Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server 2007 is getting an assist from Atlassian Software's Confluence, a leading enterprise wiki, and NewsGator, a leading RSS management platform.

At the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit today, Atlassian will announce the SharePoint Connector for Confluence, which integrates Confluence with the Office SharePoint Server 2007. The connector is available in beta as a download. Pricing or the general release date for SharePoint Connector for Confluence has not been set, Walker said.

"In the summer Microsoft approached us. At the same time every large customer was experiencing political friction between the Microsoft document/email-centric users and a growing group of wiki users, in our case Confluence," said Jeffrey Walker, president of Atlassian. "Users want to search across both. Microsoft knew we were Java-based, but approached us anyway. Once we decided to do it, we found we were pretty like-mined and collaborated with Microsoft engineers." In part, the solution was driven by shared customers, such as Accenture, Walker added.

The SharePoint Connector for Confluence offers single sign-on and user access profiles as well as the capability to search across both Confluence and SharePoint. In addition, users can embed Confluence page content with SharePoint and access SharePoint lists and content within Confluence. For example, users can embed links to SharePoint Office document lists from SharePoint and get into edit mode with a single click.

"Most things in SharePoint are stored in lists--documents, appointments, people," said Walker. "If you know the list name, we can connect over the SharePoint API so you can view and edit them in Confluence. Word or Excel documents, for example, can be included in a developer space, with access to the them from within Confluence and to all the associated workflow."

NewsGator announced the availability of NewsGator Social Sites, a set of templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware that integrates with Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

"We enabled RSS feed management, search and customized feeds within SharePoint. Users can clip, email, tag, rate and share items with co-workers. The shared items steps into the social dimension. If it were just using SharePoint as a super-wiki, it would be a lot less interesting," said Jeff Nolan, vice president corporate development at NewsGator. Pricing is in $20,000 range for a perpetual license for large enterprises.

By integrating with Atlassian and NewsGator Microsoft is building out SharePoint as a richer Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform. For developers like Atlassian and NewsGator, SharePoint is an attractive proposition--Office SharePoint Server generated over $800 million for Microsoft's FY 2007, an increase of over 35 percent compared to the previous year.

Update: Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield points out that his company launched SocialPoint a year ago, which integrates his wiki platform with SharePoint. He congratulates Atlassian and NewsGator on their SharePoint integration.

See also: Dennis Howlett's analysis