I have started work on our next main white paper, entitled `Microsoft Cloud 2.0 – FAST Social Computing` and which will be available some time this week.

Microsoft vs Salesforce.com Showdown

As per the title and the whole idea of this site in general is that it maps vendor technologies to best practice programs. In this case how Microsoft offers tools for implementing Cloud 2.0.

In the previous white paper I just published last week, Cloud Computing and the Drummond Report, the vendor review section promises a `Microsoft vs Salesforce.com Showdown`, meaning a comparison of what each vendor offers in this category.

For Microsoft this primarily means the Sharepoint product set, and the related Enterprise 2.0 partner ecosystem.

As a backgrounder you can check out a previous paper I wrote, a few years called Enterprise 2.0 – Harnessing the Wikipedia Effect, which has since evolved through Crowdsourcing and now become Cloud 2.0 to also add the technical aspects as well.

FAST Social Computing

Using Microsoft for this type of Enterprise 2.0 working mode, is what they refer to as `Social Computing`.

In their white paper People working together (13-page PDF) Microsoft describe how their ‘Information Worker’ product set (Office, Sharepoint, Unified Comms etc.) is ideal for what I refer to as `Knowledge Process Management`.

In the case of Salesforce.com they`ve bought companies like Chatter, Rypple and Radian6 to add a `social layer` to their core CRM platform, so it will be a pound for pound comparison of these two main areas.

With Microsoft the other main technology that will be incorporated comes from their 2008 acquisition of FAST, the enterprise search engine software start-up.

Hence the title, not only is social media intended to be quick and lightweight, but literally the inclusion of the FAST product is what makes the formula really successful. So I`ll mainly be focusing on what FAST can do and how it augments social media working practices.