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.
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.
The association plans to expand its rollout to support 1 million students, using SharePoint for document and workflow management and site security. It also uses Windows SharePoint Services, a feature of Windows Server for creating ad hoc online workgroups, to support team collaboration sites.
“We will continue to base all collaboration, document and project work spaces and presence awareness on SharePoint,” Lloyd says.
SharePoint’s challenges
SharePoint Server faces a number of challenges – just as its predecessor Exchange did – in trying to become a hub for application development and user collaboration. First, the server will have to prove it can scale to handle the Internet-facing Web sites users may build. Microsoft also will have to define clearly the differences and advantages in using SharePoint Server for Web sites rather than Internet Information Server and ASP.net.
Licensing will be watched closely also. Content Management Server licenses cost an average of $20,000 to $40,000; with the server now folded into SharePoint Server, the question is, will tiered pricing determine what features and functionality are available?
Given the breadth of SharePoint Server’s capabilities, Microsoft will have to provide users with clear starting points, experts say. “Something so users can say ‘OK, we want to integrate that with our line-of-business applications. We want to map workflow to the reality of our approval processes,'” says Peter Pawlak, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft.
A major portion of the work needed to get users started likely will fall on the 800 SharePoint partners Microsoft already has. “You are going to see [independent software vendors] jump on SharePoint,” says Brent Bolleman, strategic marketing manager for Colligo, which just shipped an offline client for SharePoint intended to eclipse the basic functionality offered with Outlook and the Groove client. The client has two versions: Reader, which lets users take documents offline for reading, and Contributor, which is an offline client for project teams that includes sophisticated replication features. “With SharePoint as the de facto place to expose all of these different content types, it gives you a central place where all these applications can have their content exposed to the network, where before all of it was segmented,” Bolleman says.
The foremost challenge to SharePoint Server, however, will be the same one Exchange faced: IBM/Lotus. That Microsoft rival is reshaping its collaborative software around Notes/Domino and the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition-based Workplace platform, and is already positioning itself against SharePoint. “I am not that impressed with the directions that I’m seeing,” says Larry Bowden, vice president of Workplace software solutions for IBM/Lotus. He says Microsoft is working toward a point Lotus was at 10 years ago.
