“War of the Cloud Services: iCloud vs. Google, Do.com vs. Microsoft SharePoint” compares the hottest contenders for software as a service in collaboration, general business, messaging, and multimedia.

Do from Salesforce has an online, intuitive collaborative system with a clean interface using social tools that connect to Google’s cloud services.  However, it is still in private beta and it does not look promising for enterprise use in part because tasks cannot be set up with a workflow.  There are customization options, however, so organizations can build their own ways of keeping track of projects and tasks.

After all, enterprise collaboration and sharing services such as SharePoint and Alfresco are easily hosted on the cloud, since they’re web-based already. SharePoint can easily be run on Azure-based services, and Alfresco is easily installed on Amazon Web Service Linux-based machines.

SharePoint has a large learning curve, so despite Do’s shortcomings, it may have an advantage for smaller organizations.

For general business services, in the Google vs. iCloud comparison, iCloud has the weakness of requiring that each service must be started or set up by an application running on the Apple operating systems OSX or iOS.  Also iCloud’s iWorks does not recognize any of the Open Document Formats, unlike Google’s equivalent services.

For messages, iMessages works only with other iMessages users and iMessages only works on iOS.  In contrast, Google Talk, although only for use with other Google Talk users, can run on Android devices and any browser and can even be run on iOS through third-party applications.  Video conferencing has no clear winner in the comparison, but Google Music may soon be giving iTunes a run for its money if it can expand its offerings while continuing to keep down its pricing.  The article concludes that unless you already own Apple devices that the Google collection of services will be much more convenient.

As the article above mentions, for the enterprise SharePoint is the logical choice for enterprise collaboration but has a steep learning curve.  To flatten out this difficulty, look to the Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform from Smartlogic with enhanced search and navigation and the findability advantage.

Ken Toth, January 10, 2012