[written on the way home, posted the next evening]
I'm on the train home from Wiki Wednesday in London and although it was a great evening and I enjoyed almost all of it, I'm a little annoyed about a couple of the presentation. I went along with the intention of demonstrating wiki functionality in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 which as time was running short I think I did ok with in a 5 minute slot. There were other presentation from other Wiki software, and people who are using wikis in an enterprise type environment.
What annoyed me was some guy from something called SMBlive who first of all claimed SharePoint was expensive while I was presenting, and then later claimed it wasn't a collaboration platform.
The SMBLive person got up and did a sales pitch saying they'd used the SharePoint platform, but scrapped it all and built a new UI on it for small businesses to use free of charge. Fair enough that's possible, after all the SharePoint UI doesn't float everyones boat. But claiming that in it's current state it wasn't a collaborative platform is a bit of a joke. And as for the free part, it's free for 2 users, with a 10 mb limit. So basically you can host one file with it as lets face it a word or powerpoint document can easily be over 10 mb these days. As soon as you want more space you have to pay for it, and more than two users, you need to pay £7.50 a month for each of them. Rather than this SMBLive Product why not just use Office Live? Apparently BT are investing lots of money into these SMBLive products, but I have to ask myself when was the last time BT managed to do anything worth while for collaboration and small businesses.
The most annoying part of it all was that the guy from SMBLive left as soon as he'd done his pitch, so I couldn't even discuss with him the points he'd made about SharePoint. Next time I should just shout out while he's presenting perhaps?
The last presentation I saw was by Barry Shrier. He decided that on a night called Wiki Wednesday he'd present about his new service called The Good Club.com (I'm not going to give it any link love!). At that point I decided to leave. I'm really sorry to the people I'd missed as I'm sure there were still lots of great presentation, and the initial ones were great as well, but there's only so many sales pitches I can take when it's supposed to be a community type evening.
Thanks to Goodman Jones who hosted the evening, and David Terrar who organised it all.