"Microsoft is unveiling a series of upgrades and additions to SharePoint that it believes will appeal to business users as well as to individual consumers."
This is a direct result of the recent Microsoft announcement of the strategic alliance with Atlassian and NewsGator.
Atlassian's Confluence product is making its way into the SharePoint's stack by way of a plug-in. This plug-in allows information to be shared between the Confluence Wiki application and SharePoint.
A beta version of the plug-in is available here.
NewsGator's Social Sites product built specifically for SharePoint will add more functionality such as an improved RSS Reader, Feed Manager, Tagging and other Web 2.0 and social networking widgets.
NewGators announced the general availability of Social Sites at the Web 2.0 Conference on October 17th, 2007.
Related Articles
Microsoft Adds Web 2.0 Enhancements To SharePoint
June 20, 2007: TechWeb, David Gardner
Read Gardner's interview with Derek Burney, General Manager of SharePoint Platform & Tools, on the Web 2.0 technologies Microsoft is delivering under the SharePoint platform. The article also references how customers like Hawaiian Airlines and the Body Shop are using SharePoint Server 2007 for their external facing websites.
Microsoft does 'social computing' with SharePoint
June 19, 2007: CNET News.com, Martin LaMonica
Microsoft announced Community Kit for SharePoint, a Web add-on that enables businesses to take advantage of "Enterprise 2.0" services, such as enhancing a blog's look, better wiki tools, and a tag cloud feature.
Most business tech pros wary about Web 2.0 tools in business
February 24, 2007: Information Week, Nicholas Hoover
This article discusses the concerns enterprises have about the security, return on investment, and employees' adoption of Web 2.0 business tools. It also mentions how different corporations are using SharePoint and other Microsoft products to improve their collaboration platform.