By Chris Alliegro [bio]
Posted: Apr. 2, 2007

The following an excerpt of a Research Report published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

Contributing Analysts: Paul DeGroot, Greg DeMichillie, Rob Helm, and Matt Rosoff

Enhancements in SharePoint Server 2007 and its Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 platform could drive upgrades and expand adoption by targeting new business scenarios. SharePoint Server (formerly SharePoint Portal Server) has been Microsoft's strategic platform for corporate portals, Web sites that provide an entry point to corporate information and applications. Its portal features have gotten incremental improvements, but it also delivers new features for managing corporate records, publishing Web content, and creating business intelligence applications. WSS 3.0, the platform on which SharePoint Server 2007 is built, includes better features for organizing and storing documents and data, and new blog and wiki features that could help workers informally exchange ideas and compile information.

Together, the new features of WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007 could expand the product line's installed base and offer new opportunities for ISVs and systems integrators. However, they will also threaten entrenched enterprise content management and business intelligence players, such as EMC and Hyperion.

This report describes the major changes and new features in WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007, both of which shipped in Nov. 2006. It is intended to help IT decision-makers evaluate the pros and cons of those products before making purchase or upgrade decisions. The report contains sections describing improvements to features in WSS 3.0 for team collaboration and in SharePoint Server 2007 for corporate portals, their original intended uses, followed by sections describing SharePoint Server 2007's features for enterprise content management, business intelligence, and search. Two appendices outline pricing for SharePoint Server 2007 and describe an important new feature that helps developers extract data from business applications, such as the mySAP CRM and ERP applications,, and include those data in SharePoint Server 2007 sites.