Summary: US Bank dumps Microsoft Sharepoint, moves to Lotus instead

Sharepoint is about Microsoft lock-in, which Novell helps promote. Microsoft's "insider friends" (as Microsoft itself calls them) use Sharepoint as a sort of prison facility for former UNIX/Linux shops to run out of options. Some major banks in Europe are reported to have run into huge disasters (downtimes lasting days) due to Sharepoint. It's a really bad -- albeit hyped-up -- product.

US Bank, a company that's no smaller than Microsoft, has just decided to dump Sharepoint. Could this be the beginning of a trend?

One of the largest banks in the United States will stop writing checks for Microsoft Sharepoint and standardize on the IBM Lotus platform instead.

The trouble here is that this bank merely swaps 'masters'. It will be a prisoner of IBM rather than Microsoft's. "There can't be too many banks that fell for the Microsoft ideology," argues our reader, "but apparently there are some. I wonder when these other banks will learn that ideology does not trump profitability and also dump Microsoft for Lotus or one of these:

• O3Spaces



• Lenya



• SugarCRM



• Alfresco



• Main pyrus



• Nuxeo

The above are free/open source products. More banks should take control of their own information and their own tools/systems, rather than be so medieval. ⬆