The next update to Microsoft's SharePoint line of portal and
collaboration software will integrate the products with the
company's .net framework and tie them tightly to Microsoft's other
server software, Microsoft said yesterday.
New versions of Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server and SharePoint
Team Services are not due until mid-2003, according to SharePoint
product manager Trina Seinfeld.
The company timed the release of its road map for the products to
coincide with the opening of the Delphi Group's Spring Enterprise
Portal and Web Services Conference in California. Pricing and
licensing details for the new versions are not yet available.
First released in April 2001 in conjunction with Microsoft's Office
XP launch, SharePoint Portal Server has sold 3 million seat
licences, while SharePoint Team Services has been used for
thousands of collaborative Web sites, according to Microsoft.
The next SharePoint versions will natively support Extensible
Markup Language (XML) Web services and allow developers to
customise portals with Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net.
SharePoint Portal Server will be integrated with several other
Microsoft products, including its BizTalk Server and Content
Management Server (CMS), extending functionality introduced last
week, when Microsoft released a free integration pack to tie
together SharePoint and CMS.
Linking SharePoint and CMS allows users to access documents quickly
through SharePoint and publish them through CMS, according to
Microsoft.
Integrating SharePoint with BizTalk, which is used to connect
applications from various vendors, will enable single sign-on to
numerous applications and increase levels of personalisation for
portal users, Seinfeld said.
BizTalk Server offers adapters for integrating some 300
applications, including software from SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and
J.D. Edwards.
The SharePoint product line update will also bolster the software's
scalability and robustness, Seinfeld said.
Ferris Research had criticised the initial version of SharePoint
Portal Server in a report last April, saying poor load-balancing
support was a particularly troubling flaw.
With Microsoft's various product announcements pointing towards an
integrated .net future, the company's SharePoint road map is
unsurprising, according to Ferris Research analyst Michael Sampson.
Nor is Microsoft's move to use the update to bolster the software's
reliability. The company traditionally tackles enterprise-user
concerns in versions two and three of its products, Ferris wrote.
"Organisations that need to move ahead immediately should proceed
with shipping products from others vendors," said Sampson.