Microsoft revamps SharePoint server

SharePoint Portal Server will be renamed as Office SharePoint Server 2007.

After several years without a clear focal point for its collaboration strategy, Microsoft now is planning to put SharePoint Server at the center of its efforts.

When Office 2007 ships to corporate users later this year, it is expected to include what today is known to more than 70 million licensed users as SharePoint Portal Server, but revamped and renamed Office SharePoint Server 2007. The software will be the foundation for sharing all the document types produced by Office desktop applications. It also will be the switching station for workflow, document routing and approval, instant messaging and presence information, business intelligence, search and electronic forms. Content Management Server features will be folded into SharePoint Server.

SharePoint Server will be pitched to corporate users as a multitasking, identity-enabled engine for hosting collaborative sites for the Internet and company intranets and extranets. Microsoft is planning an option for it to be licensed per CPU, so users can host Web sites on the platform.

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After several years without a clear focal point for its collaboration strategy, Microsoft now is planning to put SharePoint Server at the center of its efforts.

When Office 2007 ships to corporate users later this year, it is expected to include what today is known to more than 70 million licensed users as SharePoint Portal Server, but revamped and renamed Office SharePoint Server 2007. The software will be the foundation for sharing all the document types produced by Office desktop applications. It also will be the switching station for workflow, document routing and approval, instant messaging and presence information, business intelligence, search and electronic forms. Content Management Server features will be folded into SharePoint Server.

SharePoint Server will be pitched to corporate users as a multitasking, identity-enabled engine for hosting collaborative sites for the Internet and company intranets and extranets. Microsoft is planning an option for it to be licensed per CPU, so users can host Web sites on the platform.

Office 2007 plugs two glaring holes in SharePoint Server by adding offline client capabilities, through Office Groove and Outlook, and a rapid application development tool called SharePoint Designer. The server also is integrated with Visual Studio 2005 and the .Net 2.0 Framework so developers can build and easily debug components that Designer will use to stitch together SharePoint applications. "This is the nod that SharePoint is the server we are going to put a lot of the collaboration work under," says John Carins, senior director of information worker licensing and packaging for Microsoft.

The message should have a familiar ring to many corporate users. Six years ago, Exchange was the darling of collaboration at Microsoft. The platform was infused with instant messaging and conferencing, and was groomed to support collaborative applications built with rapid application development tools. A much-touted feature that fell flat was the Web Store, a SQL-based virtual repository intended to house numerous document types, and let users and developers pull together data from across corporate servers and stitch it into sophisticated collaborative applications. "Exchange was just a little too early for its time," says Tom Rizzo, director of SharePoint Portal Server at Microsoft. "But no matter where the technology sits, we have always had this vision of unified collaboration to make people productive, from the information worker to the IT pro all the way through to the developers. SharePoint is evolving to solve that need."

Of course, strategy is all Microsoft has now, because SharePoint Server was not included in the first beta of Office 2007, and users won't get their first look at it until the second beta is made available later this year. General availability of Office 2007 for customers with volume licenses is planned for November; SharePoint Server is available only through volume licensing.

Some users say they like the direction and are mobilizing to get in line. "We are re-engineering our entire product line to align with the extended capabilities and enhancements found in the next generation of SharePoint," says Cliff Lloyd, executive director of the Solutions IT Group for the Association of Independent Schools of Western Australia.