SharePoint collaboration software, Microsoft introduced the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint, a piece of open-source software designed to let workers record and share video and audio presentations over the public Web and intranets. Microsoft unveiled PKS through its CodePlex open-source community at the Enterprise 2.0 show June 9 in Boston. The program went into full seing June 10 with presentations from FedEx, Google, Socialtext and other players in the space. Companies use podcasting technology to provide company news, conduct employee orientations, and boost career training and e-learning.
Rob Curry, director of Microsoft SharePoint, said Microsoft's sales organization implemeted PKS internally during the past year, accesing audio or video podcast on Pcs, Windows Mobile devices,
Zunes and any othe podcast devices. Consulting company Accenture participated in the PKS pilot program along with its client BT Group to offer Web 2.0 based learning and collaboration software. Roughly 50 other enterprise customers are testing PKS through Microsoft's Technology Adoption Program. PKS can do quite a bit. Users can connect with podcasters via integrated instant messaging programs and use a rating system, tag clouds and search functions to find podcast content. Users can also subscribe to RSS feeds to receive automatic podcas update and play podcasts in real time using Silverlight and progressive playback.
Future versions of PKS could include a rich Window Mobile client; a three dimensional user interface to run on Vista; a cross-OS Podcasting client ( In addition to Zune software); embedded video and audio capture and editing; peer to peer media playback and downloading; Windows Live ID and Windows Live Messenger intgration; and compatibility with Flash, in addition to silverlight. That Microsoft's would add podcasting tools to a collaboration platform such as SharePoint makes sense, but what can be gained by open-sourcing a tool that is already free for users whoo license SharePoint? Curry said PKS is a great way for companis interested in e-learning to get started, nothing that there are more than 100 tools for the platform available under open source through CodePlex.
Microsoft can certainly afford to make freeware part of SharePoint; the company has sold 100 milion licenses for office SharePoint Server 2007, for $1 billion in annual sales. PKS comes concurrent with a flock of new partnerships Microsoft has inked with smaller startups looking to leverage the wild succes of SharePoint, which offers knowledge workers social computing, blog, wiki, RSS and mashup tools along with enterprise content management and search.
Awareness, Atlassian, WorkLight, NewGator, Leverage Software, Bluekiwi Software, Connectbeam, Telligent Systems and Tomoye are integrating with platform in some way or another.
Forrester Research says this enterprise social computing market will increase from $764 milion in 2008 to $4.6 bilion by 2013.
--Clint Boulton
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