In conjunction with the opening of the Delphi Group's Spring Enterprise Portal and Web Services Conference, Microsoft today announced the product strategy and road map for the next version of SharePoint Products and Technologies, the company's enterprise portal and collaboration solution. The next version of SharePoint utilizes the application server technologies in Windows .NET Server to deliver a robust portal and collaboration framework based on Microsoft .NET. SharePoint Portal Server and SharePoint Team Services will be tightly integrated, providing a unified environment that connects users to information, enterprise applications and collaborative tools throughout the enterprise.
Since the introduction of SharePoint Products and Technologies one year ago, tens of thousands of SharePoint Team Services Web sites have been deployed in organizations around the world, and SharePoint Portal Server has sold more than 3 million seats. American Medical Response (AMR), the nation's largest private provider of medical transportation, chose SharePoint Portal Server to leverage the strength of its vast work force. AMR responds to 4 million patients per year and has thousands of employees in offices across the country. With SharePoint Portal Server, AMR was able to streamline access to vital information, and employees benefited from SharePoint Portal Server's seamless integration into its Microsoft infrastructure.
"We put SharePoint to work quickly to enable hundreds of employees to collaborate on cross-enterprise task forces," said David Fryman, vice president of information technology at AMR. "Leveraging best practices throughout our organization is a priority. SharePoint has been used as a catalyst to help change the way people work. This is truly a communications vehicle to help change the culture of an organization; it puts the power of the enterprise in the hands of the individual. The investment Microsoft is making in the SharePoint platform creates real value for our users and delivers direct benefit to our bottom line."
The next version of SharePoint Portal Server will deliver a highly scalable and customizable portal application with information aggregation, advanced search capabilities and mainstream enterprise application integration, provided via integration with Microsoft BizTalk Server. Additional improvements include single sign-on, personalization and integration with Microsoft Content Management Server, building on the Content Management Server with SharePoint Portal Server 2001 Integration Pack that Microsoft announced last week as the first step in a comprehensive and well-integrated portal and content management solution.
Microsoft will focus on three key investment areas for the next generation of SharePoint Products and Technologies. First, by building on the .NET Framework, SharePoint technology will natively support XML Web services and will provide the most integrated portal solution on the Windows .NET Server platform. Second, enhancements to SharePoint Portal Server 2001 will build on the strength of the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Server family to deliver a robust, scalable portal solution for the enterprise. Third, in the team collaboration space, the next release of SharePoint Team Services will provide rich, flexible team workspace capabilities that will serve as the engine for enterprise collaboration, from the individual level to the corporate level. The combination of a rich collaboration environment in SharePoint Team Services and the unified portal capabilities in SharePoint Portal Server will allow customers to effectively build, manage and connect islands of team productivity across an enterprise.
"SharePoint brings the richness of Microsoft .NET to knowledge workers," said Kurt DelBene, vice president of the Authoring and Collaboration Services Group at Microsoft. "End users will have a seamless experience in moving across their collaboration and portal environments. In addition, SharePoint Products and Technologies will serve as the development foundation of upcoming Microsoft and third-party solutions to further enhance enterprise portal functionality and workplace collaboration."
Microsoft .NET is the company's strategy for next-generation XML Web services and applications that connect people, devices and information throughout the Internet in seamless, secure ways. In addition to taking advantage of the .NET Framework, ASP.NET and XML, the next generation of SharePoint Products and Technologies will allow developers to use Visual Studio .NET to extend and customize portals as well as portal-enable other applications. This will enable a rich portal and collaboration environment that brings the value of integrated XML Web services to the end user.
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server - Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001 is a flexible Web-based portal solution you can use to find, share, and publish information easily. It provides a rich, customizable out-of-the-box Web portal that gives users quick access to business-critical information throughout an organization. It integrates basic document management functions, such as check in, check out, document profiles, and document publishing, with Microsoft Office products. In addition, users can create SharePoint Portal Server workspaces to plan, share, and manage project documents.
Based on Microsoft digital dashboard technology, the SharePoint Portal Server dashboard site offers a single customizable source for accessing information drawn from a wide variety of content sources while maintaining the security of the documents. External content sources can include other SharePoint Portal Server workspaces, intranet or Internet sites, Microsoft Exchange 2000 and Exchange Server 5.5 public folder hierarchies, Lotus Notes 4.6a+ and R5 databases, local file systems, and network file servers. You can deploy SharePoint Portal Server within a department or across an entire organization. It is designed to work seamlessly with familiar applications, such as Office and Microsoft Internet Explorer, so employees throughout an organization can take advantage of the product immediately.
You can index the most important enterprise content sources and content types, and capture and respect security settings for Windows, Exchange, and Lotus Notes. The software offers powerful results from search queries based on an advanced probabilistic ranking algorithm. You are enabled to stay current on topics, documents, and searches using subscriptions based on scalable persistent query technology, and classify similar types of content and group it appropriately through automatic categorization technology. You can also incorporate business processes around documents with check in, check out, versioning, and approval routing functionality, and you can easily track document history so you can roll back to previous versions.