Gates Previews SharePoint Server 2007 at Eponymous Event

Published: May 17, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Microsoft this week hosted its first ever event dedicated to its SharePoint middleware, appropriately dubbed the SharePoint Conference and hosted right down the road from Redmond in Bellevue, Washington. Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder and chief software architect, opened up the event with a keynote, where he talked up SharePoint and gave a bit of a preview for Office SharePoint Server 2007, the next release of the software.

The current edition of the software, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, is a Web portal that Microsoft has created based on its Windows SharePoint Servers, a free component of the Windows Server 2003 stack that provides content management, search, and document management capabilities. Rather than make SharePoint just a piece of the Windows server stack as a service, Microsoft used the XML-based services embodied in SharePoint to create a Web portal, which it then made a part of the Office suite of office automation software. The idea is that the end users who create text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and other kinds of documents need a way to collect, manage, and share these documents from a central point. Since collaboration is all about sharing, the name SharePoint is apt.

In his keynote address, Gates said that Microsoft has shipped more than 75 million licenses to SharePoint Portal Server 2003, which was announced in October 2003. Even by Microsoft standards, this is a huge number of licenses and it demonstrates that in creating SharePoint, Microsoft was most definitely delivering a product that companies needed to help them better manage the documents they create with Office and better share them with colleagues. While this sounds easy enough with the commercialized Internet, far too many of us still use sneakernet, e-mail, or FTP to share documents, and the very nature of that sharing is serial, not collaborative and simultaneous.

In his keynote, Gates explained the situation behind the changes Microsoft is making with Office in general and with SharePoint Server in particular. While this is a lengthy quote, it shows that Gates and Microsoft not only see the problem, but an opportunity to solve it and make money on it:

"One of the challenges we've always had is that the information that's digitally stored inside applications is not really coming out in a way that people can see what's going on with quality trends, what's going on with the key customers, what's the profitability as the price changes, how are the sales results by product, by geography, what are the trends there. That visibility to really empower people still requires printing lots of things out and digging through reports and people being surprised, not being able to annotate and share in a simple fashion. Now, one of the reasons for that is the barrier between the structured information that's deep inside often thousands and thousands of tables in that ERP system and the more ad hoc straightforward way people like to work together; that hasn't been bridged. And that's one of the challenges we've really taken on with Office 2007, and in particular with the way that pulling that information out into the SharePoint environment, we've made that possible."

In March, at the Office System Developers Conference, Microsoft previewed some of the new search capabilities that are coming in SharePoint Server 2007, as well as tighter integration with its Outlook email client, offline document library access, new dashboards for business intelligence based on its Excel spreadsheet. (The latter is similar to the "Maestro" Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 software that Microsoft announced last year, apparently.) This week, Gates raised the curtain a little higher on SharePoint Server 2007, saying that the software would be modernized with wiki, blog, and RSS capabilities--the latest tools being used for intranet and Internet publishing. Wiki is a popular means of creating an open and editable document on the Web. RSS is a way to syndicate content using XML files on your Web site and RSS readers that people use to poll sites to look for updated documents on RSS-capable sites. And blogs are, of course, online diaries. Wiki and blog documents are more standardized than HTML and XML documents, but still are Web-viewable, which is why they are so popular. You don't have to know HTML or XML to be a content publisher, either, which is why these two formats are ubiquitous. RSS distribution is a pull method and it can be automated, rather than a push method like email, which is why it is a popular alternative to email. Significantly, email readers are being retrofitted to support RSS feed, and it won't be too long before emails and RSS feeds will be virtually indistinguishable except for one thing: You have to ask to get an RSS feed, and anyone in the world can send you an email.

SharePoint Server 2007 will also, says Gates, include more sophisticated workflow to manage the creation, distribution, and publication of documents than is currently possible with SharePoint Server 2003.

Kurt DelBene, vice president of the Office Server Group at Microsoft, said that SharePoint Server 2007 will take the Web site management capabilities of the company's Content Manager Server middleware and merge it with the SharePoint Services for Windows to provide a unified means of managing content, whether it is on the public Internet, on extranets with partners, or intranets for employees. He added that more than 180 partners have already started building solutions to ride on top of SharePoint Server 2007. (You can see the list of partner solutions for SharePoint Server by clicking here.)

SharePoint Server 2007 is in a limited beta with selected customers right now, and will go into a broader public beta "later this spring." It is the middle of May, and five weeks away from the beginning of summer. That should mean in a few weeks, but it probably means late June. Office 12 is expected to be released to manufacturing in the fall and generally available in October or so.

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