Full Circle Associates

Collaborative Strategies blogged the aquisition today and this bit caught my eye:

What’s Left?

Microsoft has rounded out its offerings in RTC and the virtual team space, but there are still some areas of the CS Collaboration taxonomy where Microsoft is not yet strong. Could these be potential areas for future acquisition? The areas in our taxonomy that Microsoft is not strong in are: online communities, knowledge management, expertise location, and distributed portfolio/program management capabilities. Right now MS project is the predominant player in the project space, but MS project was built for the project manager or project professional to plan a project, and is not a tool for distributed teams to use for interactions and work within the project. Combined with either of the SharePoint servers, Project can be used as a DPM (distributed project management) tool, but it is a weak and kind of kluged solution at best. So will Microsoft be hunting for one of the current DPM vendors as its next acquisition?

Knowledge management and expertise location are the next target for the Borg, and there are some fertile fields here also. Most of the KM area has focused on search, and certainly Microsoft has been working on better search tools, but there are some new tools and approaches to this problem available in this space that might be interesting acquisitions for Microsoft. The same is true in the expertise location area. The ability to find and access experts within and outside the enterprise is becoming more and more critical. The ability to incorporate those content experts into critical collaborative business processes like proposal development, R and D, etc. is an area that Microsoft does not yet have a solution in.

Read the rest. It is spot on except that I think they are a bit more optimistic than I am!