Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 is a popular collaboration toolkit and environment, regularly deployed by medium and large enterprises, partly because of the way it is bundled with their Microsoft server licences. It has wiki capability, but from what I've seen, it looks pretty limited. The SharePoint wiki situation just got a whole lot better with the announcement by Atlassian, over at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit, of the SharePoint Connector for Confluence. This integration of Confluence, one of the better "enterprise strength" wiki technologies already in use by over 4000 companies around the world, with SharePoint has got to be excellent for both companies.

It's an interesting partnership for Microsoft because of the cultural difference between them and a company that embraces Java and open source technology. When I was talking to Jeffrey Walker, Atlassian's President, earlier this week, he was very excited about it, and explained the highlights. The connector has 4 key components:

• Single Sign-On so that users can access both systems and only see what they have permission to see
• A proper search mechanism across both SharePoint and Confluence content that brings the results together in one place
• Content sharing so that users can embed a Confluence page inside the SharePoint environment
• Linking, so that users in the Confluence wiki can access SharePoint lists and content, and then navigate to edit Microsoft Office documents in a single click.

The download is available now at the Atlassian website. I hear there will be another web 2.0 related Microsoft announcement shortly, so it definitely puts the company in a stronger position in the enterprise 2.0 space, and provides an extra threat to the likes of SocialText and some of the other wiki players.