By Jay Greene 

REDMOND, Wash. -- Startups such as Slack Technologies Inc. and Box Inc. get much of the buzz in the business of simplifying workplace collaboration.

Microsoft Corp. is eager to win some of that luster for its own SharePoint software, and it is betting that a new version of the 15-year-old program, to be introduced Wednesday, will stand out by tapping an information source its rivals lack.

The software giant's special sauce: data gleaned from its widely used Office suite of email, spreadsheet and presentation tools.

Unlike Slack, which focuses on messaging, or Box, which concentrates on file-sharing, SharePoint offers a variety of collaboration functions. It includes tools for sharing files, finding information, and building websites or internal network pages to manage projects. Companies can use SharePoint to create intranet sites.

Microsoft says it wants SharePoint to help workers wade through the thicket of workplace communications and files to quickly find information that is relevant to their work. To do that, it aims to weave in insights drawn from the ways they use Office: lists of meeting attendees, frequent email correspondents, collaborators on documents, and so on. SharePoint will analyze such factors -- a body of data Microsoft calls the Office Graph -- for patterns to discover news, initiatives, reports and other information relevant to individual users.

Infusing SharePoint with the Office Graph represents an aggressive challenge to startups encroaching on the workplace-software market that Microsoft long has dominated.

The goal is to reduce the "idle chatter" that overwhelms some corporate collaboration services, said Jeff Teper, corporate vice president of OneDrive & SharePoint at Microsoft.

"We've solved the forest-through-the-trees problem that Slack doesn't solve," Mr. Teper said in an interview at Microsoft's headquarters here.

Microsoft isn't alone in trying to mine corporate documents and data to make workers more efficient. In January, Slack hired former Foursquare Inc. executive Noah Weiss to lead its machine-learning and artificial-intelligence efforts. Salesforce.com Inc. recently debuted SalesforceIQ Inbox for Outlook, a program that runs alongside Microsoft's email software and connects sales data with customer correspondence.

More than 200,000 organizations use SharePoint, including Sanofi SA, Royal Dutch Shell PLC and the Cambridgeshire Constabulary in the U.K., according to Microsoft. In total, SharePoint reaches more than 190 million users. Microsoft said SharePoint generated more than $3 billion in 2015.

The new version of Sharepoint's server software lets customers run the program in their own data center while working alongside programs such as Office 365 that are delivered on-demand over the Web. Later this quarter, Microsoft says it plans to offer mobile versions of SharePoint that will run on Apple Inc.'s iOS and Alphabet Inc.'s Android operating systems, as well as on mobile devices that run its own Windows 10.

Microsoft first offered analytical insights drawn from the Office Graph in Delve, a part of its Office 365 online service, in 2014. Delve purports to anticipate office-worker needs by delivering relevant data proactively. In two years, Delve amassed more than 1 million users, a large number for some companies but paltry compared with the masses who use SharePoint.

But customers may not be ready for the type of insight that Office Graph can provide, said Gartner Inc. analyst Jim Murphy. Some Gartner clients, whom Murphy declined to name, turned off Delve shortly after it rolled out because it exposed corporate data that was intended for a more limited audience.

"There's going to be some trepidation among companies because they don't know what it's going to surface," Mr. Murphy said.

A Microsoft spokesman said that Delve follows rules set by customers regarding access to specific information, so that it should display only information that workers can already see. Less than 1% of customers opt out of Delve after they start using it, the spokesman said.

Mr. Murphy described the Office Graph as a "work in progress" and said the biggest concerns may come from industries where privacy is paramount, such as financial services and pharmaceutical companies.

Write to Jay Greene at Jay.Greene@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 04, 2016 00:15 ET (04:15 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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