Microsoft is keenly interested in building and selling software that can aid collaboration among what it terms "information workers," especially since many of its leaders realized that enhancing collaboration among its own employees was key to Microsoft’s success. With the imminent launch of Windows SharePoint Services, a free add-on to Windows Server 2003, and Office SharePoint Portal Services 2003, a separately licensed server application, Microsoft hopes to deliver an integrated Web-based collaboration platform that scales from ad hoc sites for small teams to centrally managed corporate intranets and extranets.

Windows SharePoint Services for Team Sites

The foundation of Microsoft's new collaboration and portal strategy is Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), a document storage and Web site hosting service for Windows Server 2003. Microsoft believes WSS will make group work on documents quicker and less error-prone and will help teams coordinate and organize their work in ways that make sense to them, with little IT support. WSS promises two key functions:

Document management. WSS delivers basic document management functions, which make it easier for teams to locate and work together on documents and reduce the likelihood of errors. For example, WSS users can automatically generate and save backup copies of documents that they are about to modify, check documents in and out to avoid making changes that conflict with those of other team members, and quickly locate all documents related to a particular project or a scheduled event. All of these capabilities and more have been available in expensive document management systems, but with WSS they become basic functions of Windows.

Team sites. With WSS, users can quickly create ad hoc Web sites to organize discussions and revisions of a team-produced document (such as a contract), to collect agendas, notes, and to-do lists from meetings, and to distribute news and announcements to team members. Microsoft believes that enabling teams to create their own sites without IT intervention can improve productivity and coordination, and it already makes heavy use of team sites to coordinate its own business groups.

For Microsoft and its partners, WSS could help refute the claim that open-source products, such as Linux, Samba, and Apache, are already good enough to replace Windows on file and Web servers. In particular, Microsoft hopes that WSS will reset customer's expectations of what services internal file and Web servers should provide for their users out of the box. Microsoft also hopes that WSS will drive upgrades to Office 2003, which provides better WSS document management and team site functions than a browser.

Office SharePoint Portal Server for Portals

Office SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) is an upgrade of Microsoft's platform for creating and hosting portals. Portals are modular, customizable Web sites that provide single, well-organized starting points to corporate information for particular users. They typically are centrally managed and serve a company's employees, but may serve some partners and selected customers as well. SPS relies on WSS to provide basic Web hosting and document storage functions, but extends it with additional functions for navigation, search, application integration, and personalization (customized presentation of Web content to specific users and groups).

Microsoft believes companies can benefit from portals in several ways. Most important, portals can improve productivity by helping users quickly locate relevant corporate data and applications through a combination of categorization, keyword search, and personalization. For IT departments, however, portals also provide a standard, uniform way to give users access to applications and databases on their networks.

For Microsoft and its partners, SPS is attractive because the portal market has continued to grow; because portals help companies extract value from existing IT investments, the portals market seems likely to hold up even as other IT investments slow. Portals are also a strategic investment for many companies; once a company has invested in a portal product, it will be more inclined to choose future products that integrate well into the portal. Finally, SPS and WSS also could boost Microsoft's .NET application server technology and SQL Server database management system. SPS and WSS are built with these technologies and demonstrate their scalability and reliability. SPS and WSS also provide a response to the portal frameworks being marketed by competing application server vendors, such as IBM.

New Technology for Longtime Goals

WSS and SPS are the end of a long effort by Microsoft to popularize Windows for team sites and portals. WSS descends from a line of team site products that dates back to the Office Server Extensions of Office 2000, while SPS is the second generation of a product introduced in 2001. In the past, Microsoft has also presented Exchange Server and Outlook as a platform for both team sites and portal-like "digital dashboards" for access to corporate data.

However, WSS and SPS have some advantages that Microsoft's previous team site and portal offerings did not. First, as a free add-on to Windows Server 2003, WSS will have a much wider potential audience than any previous Microsoft team site product. Second, WSS and SPS together form a unified technology stack that in turn builds on the company's strategic .NET developer technology. Consequently, they will reinforce one another, rather than overlapping and competing as previous offerings did, and they will benefit from Microsoft’s ongoing investment in .NET development.

However, WSS and SPS are new technology. While their .NET underpinnings make make them more secure and reliable in the long run than their predecessors, in the near term companies will have to evaluate the products carefully for "version 1.0" feature gaps or reliability problems. In addition, because they are a fresh start, these products don't provide simple migration from their previous versions.

What's Ahead

The rest of this report is an overview of WSS and SPS, intended to guide evaluations by Microsoft customers and partners. It includes two major chapters:

Windows SharePoint Services Supports Office Collaboration explains the benefits of team sites and document management and outlines WSS features and architecture that support them. It also explains Office 2003's integration with WSS and notes some limitations and open questions that should be considered when evaluating WSS.

SharePoint Portal Server Radically Redesigned provides more details on the benefits of portals and explains how SPS 2003 exploits WSS to provide a more scalable and customizable base for portals than the previous generation of the product. The chapter also explains some partner opportunities for SPS and notes some migration and licensing issues that could influence evaluations.

This report updates previously published research on both WSS and SPS that appeared in the monthly newsletter Directions on Microsoft Update.