Atlassian and Newsgator bring Web 2.0 to Sharepoint

Today at the Web 2.0 Conference, Atlassian announced their Sharepoint Connector for Confluence, and Newsgator announced Newsgator Social Sites for Sharepoint.

Richard MacManus from Read/Write Web has a good interview with the CEO of Atlassian. Robert Scoble has a video interview as well. Dan Farber covers both Atlassian and Newsgator in his story. Dennis Howlett, one of the Enterprise Irregulars, adds context to the story.

These announcements are interesting for several reasons.

• It is a great example of how Microsoft works with partners to create great solutions for customers.
• It shows that Microsoft will do this even when the partner product competes with our own functionality.
• Microsoft will do it with a company like Atlassian that is "open source" and built in Java. It is all about meeting customer needs.

Sharepoint is the fastest growing server product from Microsoft. As Dan Farber points out "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."