Microsoft ships more collaborative BackOffice

Server suite, Office 2000 being rolled into knowledge-management initiative.

By JOHN FONTANA
Network World Fusion, 05/11/99

LAS VEGAS -- Microsoft today began rolling out the first components that will usher its delayed entry into the nebulas world of knowledge management.

At Networld+Interop in Las Vegas, Microsoft unveiled Team Productivity Update, a new feature of BackOffice Server that lets network administrators give end users the ability to create their own collaborative workspaces that include documents, calendars, contacts and tools to analyze line-of-business data.

The enhancements came as part of the release of BackOffice 4.5, also announced at the conference.

Team Productivity Update is a step by Microsoft to more closely tie BackOffice Server and Office 2000, which features a host of document collaboration enhancements.

The productivity update includes a setup wizard, a set of collaborative applications based on Office 2000 Server Extensions, Exchange and SQL Server, and a set of APIs. The BackOffice Server feature is the first part of Microsoft's strategy to enter the area of knowledge management, which is being pursued vigorously by Lotus.

"Our customers are challenging us to simplify the deployment of solutions based on Office and BackOffice," Microsoft officials said in a press release.

Regardless of the available technology, however, corporate users will have to make a large investment in changing the culture of their companies to work in such an open and collaborative environment. Many analysts have stressed that technology alone will not foster the broad topic of knowledge management.

Team Productivity Update will be a free update and is expected to be available in the third quarter of this year. Network administrators will need to be running Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 4, SQL Server 7.0, and the NT 4.0 Option Pack to support the collaboration features.

In addition to the collaborative upgrades, Microsoft also added a number of administrative features to BackOffice 4.5. A branch-office setup wizard and multisite deployment tool let set configurations be replicated to multiple internal or remote servers. The release also has a single management console based on Microsoft Management Console.

The suite features an intranet starter wizard that automates the creation of a Web application server and seven starter applications, such as a company directory, events calendar, help desk and expense tracking system.

BackOffice Server 4.5 integrates the latest components and service packs for SQL Server 7.0 and Systems Management Server 2.0, and includes Outlook 2000, the FrontPage 2000 Web site creation and management tools, Visual InterDev Web development system Version 6.0, and a five-user license for Seagate Info 6.0.