Yesterday I attended a BEA webcast about the future of its AquaLogic User Interaction ("ALUI") portal platform. For webcasting, the ALUI team used Microsoft's "Office Live Meeting" platform -- which wanted me to download some Office extensions and discouraged using FireFox (which ultimately worked just fine). Ironically, much of the planned ALUI roadmap seems designed to take on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server ("MOSS") 2007 directly, especially in the realm of document collaboration and web content management. To be fair, ALUI (formerly Plumtree) has always offered a Microsoft platform version. And BEA plans more functionality for .NET developers in ALUI, as well as tighter links to SharePoint. Like every other portal and content management vendor, BEA has to play a double game: compete with SharePoint and work with it at the same time. By connecting SharePoint to Office (at least in name, if not yet completely in practice), Microsoft has cleverly aggravated this bind for its competitors. It says something about Office's predominance when another major vendor can't seem to avoid it even for its own official webcasts. But as readers of our technology reports know, Microsoft has no monopoly on integrating Office with server tools, and in fact even MOSS 2007 lags some key competitors there...