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Microsoft SharePoint taking business by storm

Versatile Microsoft server may not be perfect, but it is attracting interest as tool to address anything from collaboration to process management
By John Fontana , Network World , 03/26/2008
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Microsoft's SharePoint Server is on a billion dollar juggernaut to potentially become the next must-have technology, offering companies tools for building everything from collaborative applications to Internet sites and potentially handing Microsoft its next cash cow.

"I have not seen anything like this since the early days of [Lotus] Notes," says Mike Gotta, an analyst with the Burton Group. In those days, corporate users were enamored with a shiny new technology that seemed to have infinite uses. "The talk [around SharePoint] is getting strategic now and people are talking about it as a middleware decision," Gotta says.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 is the fastest growing product in the company's history and seems to have as many uses as a Swiss Army knife. Its six focus areas are collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management (ECM), business process management and business intelligence.(Compare collaboration products.)

Just last month, Microsoft added a hosted alternative to fuel adoption. There is a "perfect storm," observers say, around SharePoint in terms of the popularity of Web-based computing, demand for less-expensive ECM and portal tools, collaboration technology and integration around Microsoft's Office suite.

Click to see: SharePoint's six focus areas

Six faces of SharePoint
Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server is cutting a swath across IT with its many capabilities. SharePoint has six focus areas, each with its strengths and weaknesses.

SharePoint Strengths Weaknesses
Collaboration   Team workspaces let users
share files easily.
 Easy to set up.
Social-networking computing tools need improvement.
Portal   Application development and integration framework for building composite applications.  Scalability issues need to be resolved with technology advances, not hardware.
Enterprise Search

Extended to line-of-business applications
Access controls across local and remote data stores.

 Still evolving, tighter integration with network architecture needed to compete on high end.
Enterprise content
management

Enhancement to basic features, such as check-in and -out, versioning.
New additions, such as business document processing,
Web content management.

  Compliance, records manage-ment need improvement or partner add-ons.
 Migration issues from Microsoft Content Management Server.
Business process
and forms
 XML-based forms strategy with easy integration to enterprise-application-integration tools including BizTalk.
  Built-in human workflow support, as well as lightweight event handlers.
  Web forms are limited to a subset of full client forms’ features.
  Relatively difficult development experience for moderate and advanced features.
Business intelligence   Server is solid foundation.
  Server-based platform for
Excel documents.
 Business-data catalog awkward in getting information in and out.
CREDIT: NETWORK WORLD; SHAREPOINTSHEPHERD.COM

The attention is a wake up call for competitors, especially IBM/Lotus, as SharePoint could pull customers  to other Microsoft software because it is closely integrated with Microsoft's unified communications stack, its e-mail server, Office and Office applications including back-end file sharing repositories for Excel, Word and PowerPoint.

SharePoint was first introduced in 2001 to less than lukewarm reviews as SharePoint Portal Server. In 2003, a stripped down version was offered for free as part of Windows Server 2003 R2, which made it easy for users to test drive the software and soon end-user created team worksites began popping up all over corporate networks.

In 2008, SharePoint has evolved into the prototypical Microsoft tool – good enough for small-to-midsize businesses, adaptable to large enterprises, and, most important, plenty of financial opportunities for third-party independent software vendors and systems integrators.

Partners involved in everything from directory management to archiving to single sign-on are reporting that SharePoint is improving their own revenue.

In March, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chief software architect, said SharePoint had passed 100 million licenses sold, had attracted 17,000 user companies, and eclipsed $1 billion in sales for his company

Many critics dispute the licensing number but not the message that SharePoint is on fire.

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Obviously you don't know what you are talking about.By Rich on April 17, 2008, 4:52 pmSharePoint Server is a separate SKU. Look through every Office Suite SKU and none include SharePoint Server (MOSS) and SharePoint 3.0 (WSS) comes free with Windows...

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A so good product that we are entirely revamping it...By Cliffer on April 1, 2008, 11:17 amSounds like a PR of Microsoft. Yes renamed it Sharepoint Office and add it to the Office Suite that will helps with the numbers. In reality most of the Sharepoint...

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Ignorance is kindBy Anonymous on March 30, 2008, 8:26 pmYou can rush into a Sharepoint project but don't expect it to compensate for your lack of planning...

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Out-of-the-box mentalityBy Anonymous on March 30, 2008, 8:23 pmSharepoint is a platform. To maximize it, you mush push it to meet your expectations. In 6 weeks, we build our Lean Six Sigma management system. Since then, we are...

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Open Source ApproachBy Anonymous on March 30, 2008, 7:58 pmOne of the main reason that Sharepoint 2007 has gain so much traction is because Microsoft publishes its API to its customers. This turns it into a platform where...

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