MSR Consulting TechnoBlog

Sharepoint most powerful tool in Office 2007

June 10th, 2006

SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Corp.’s Web publishing and collaboration tool, is the “most revolutionary element” of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2007 suite, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said today.

In a keynote speech at Microsoft’s first SharePoint Conference in Bellevue, Wash., Gates said that the collaboration and workflow capabilities enabled in Office 2007, which is due by year’s end, will be as significant as when Microsoft first brought together its separate Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications into the Office 95 suite 12 years ago.

“The idea that every worker should have that full set of tools we now take for granted,” Gates told an audience of several thousand system architects and developers. “At the server level, we have not had that.”

Microsoft’s prior versions include SharePoint Portal Server 2001 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Both provided basic workflow and collaboration features for workers to create internal Web portals. But they lacked “compelling” features that would have caused end users “to pound on the doors of their IT departments asking them to install,” said Peter O’Kelly, an analyst with Salt Lake City-based Burton Group’s recently created Collaboration and Content Strategies team.

“Microsoft has had a number of false starts in the past,” O’Kelly said. But he praised features in the upcoming SharePoint 2007, including wikis, blogs and RSS feeds; greater integration with Microsoft Office that allow users to access and change data in real-time through a Web browser or an Office application such as Excel; and search for data across multiple SharePoint sites at once.

He also said SharePoint’s improved authentication and other features will enable it to better publish content outside of the intranet, even to users of non-Microsoft Web browsers.

“For how people are working today and what Microsoft is promising to deliver, I think it will be absolutely pivotal for many organizations,” he said.

O’Kelly said the long-dormant collaboration market is enjoying a renaissance, with leading vendors investing “billions of dollars” in developing products to convince enterprises that their existing infrastructure of e-mail and instant messaging software combined with a server for storing file attachments is not enough.

Microsoft’s main competition for SharePoint includes IBM, which has two offerings: its venerable Lotus Notes client paired with the Domino Server, as well as a Workplace client that runs separately or with its WebSphere Java-based application server. A public beta for Notes 8.0, code-named Hannover, is expected later this year, according to O’Kelly. WebSphere Portal 6, also due out later this year, is a “pretty credible alternative”—especially for companies that are not end-to-end Microsoft users.

Other competitors, according to O’Kelly, include Oracle Corp., with its Collaboration Suite; Novell Corp. with its GroupWise messaging software; and several emerging open-source vendors, many of whom are offering cheap or free wikis via the Internet

Entry Filed under: Small Business Server, Sharepoint, Internet Business Tools, Sharepoint Portal Server, Consulting