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In his AIIM post entitled The Future of SharePoint (and Windows 7 Phone) Jeff Shuey predicted "that there will be a boom in solutions that look nothing like SharePoint does today. SharePoint will reach it’s true potential when it becomes intrinsic and invisible to the applications we use every day. "

This topic arose last night at the Tri-State SharePoint User Group at which Virgil Carroll and I were both presenting, at the Microsoft offices in Malvern, PA. Virgil presented on governance issues surrounding cloud solutions, and I was talking about the various competitive social platforms and how SharePoint compares. Both presentations inevitably led to a discussion on the future of SharePoint, from the known roadmap into rumors and speculation about Microsoft's future direction. My sentiments were on par with Jeff's comments - I believe in the vision of SharePoint as a platform, essentially becoming the "middleware" of enterprise business systems.

We're already beginning to see things move in this direction with the shift in marketing positioning by SharePoint competitors such as Box and Jive, which have shifted from an either/or strategy to one of integration and alignment, using their solutions as the front-end to your SharePoint back-end. Not that Microsoft likes this positioning (for one, because the other companies contend that you don't need to pay for SharePoint, but can simply integrate with the free Foundation version as your system of record), but it's another clear sign that SharePoint has become the dominant force in enterprise content management and business process management.

SharePoint provides a fairly solid solution for what I spent many of my early years in IT trying to achieve -- a single sign-on gateway to all of the enterprise systems and tools. Log in once, gain access to all of your teams, your data, your dashboards and your tools. With 2010 and Lync integration, there is no need to go outside of SharePoint for most of your collaboration needs, such as instant messaging, web meetings, or even email and calendaring. Simply right click on someone's icon or profile from wherever you are, and go. And with the vNext of SharePoint just around the corner with promises of even more social capability and automation, competitors and partners alike will be scrambling to realign their stories and their products to Microsoft's next move.

With data out from Forrester and more recently a study commissioned by Fujitsu showing the dominance of SharePoint in the enterprise, what will it take for the platform to truly become middleware for business systems?