SharePoint Portal Server, formerly known by its code name Tahoe, is now shipping. Not to be confused with the similarly named SharePoint Team Services that ships with FrontPage 2002 and versions of Office XP, SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) is a new product designed to make it easier for organizations to create customizable intranet portals that help users find and manage both internal and external information. SPS includes three core parts: a prebuilt Digital Dashboard framework for creating Web portals, a document management and storage system based on the Web Store technology (first developed for Exchange 2000), and an advanced indexing and search engine. (For detailed information on SPS, see "Tahoe Brings Document Management to the Masses" on page 3 of the Dec. 2000 Update.)

Unlike SharePoint Team Services, SPS requires both server and Client Access licenses (CALs), making it unacceptable as an Internet platform serving public clients. A server license and five CALs are US$3,999, and additional CALs are US$72 each. SPS is available from resellers and through Microsoft's volume licensing programs.

Customers will also be able to obtain SPS CALs as part of a new "Core" CAL bundle that will replace the BackOffice CAL beginning October 1, 2001. The Core CAL includes CALs for Windows 2000 Server, Exchange 2000, System Management Server, and SPS. Enterprise Agreement customers and Select and Open License customers with Upgrade Advantage for the BackOffice CAL will not automatically get upgraded to the new Core CAL, but will have the option to move to the Core CAL at renewal time.

Web Parts Extend SPS's Capabilities

SPS is the first Microsoft server product to be based on Microsoft's Digital Dashboard technology. Digital Dashboards are Web servers that can accept prebuilt XML-based "Web part" modules. Portal administrators with no knowledge of HTML can use these modules to easily customize the portal. SPS includes Web parts that provide access to all of its user and administrative functions. Organizations can also add other Web parts to their portals to augment SPS's underlying document management or search and retrieval functions.

Microsoft and dozens of partners have built additional Web parts that allow portal users to retrieve useful information from the Internet or from databases like SQL Server or Exchange 2000. This can be particularly useful when linking the portal to customer relationship management systems or enterprise resource planning systems. For example, Great Plains ships five Web parts that provide portal users access to company directory, employee business card, customer directory, customer business card, and vendor directory records stored on their Great Plains Dynamics, Solomon IV, or eEnterprise solutions.

Microsoft has published a gallery of these Web parts at www.microsoft.com/business/digitaldashboard/webpart.asp. Some are free, while others are trial versions of for-fee products.

Backup and Restore Issues Remain

When Directions on Microsoft first reviewed Tahoe Beta 2, we noted that there was no easy way to restore a single document or a document folder, and such support is still missing in the shipping version of SPS. Even though major backup vendors such as CommVault, Computer Associates, and Veritas have agents that perform these functions on the Exchange 2000 version of Web Store, they still have no equivalent agents for the SPS version of the Web Store. SPS only includes a utility called MSDMBack that dumps a snapshot of the SPS configuration and Web Store database to a file that can be copied by the nightly tape backup and used to restore an entire SPS portal to that specific point in time.

Restoring a Tahoe server remains an all-or-nothing proposition. Although restoring an entire SPS server is somewhat straightforward, the only option for recovering individual documents is to restore the complete Tahoe image to a different machine and copy the documents back into the original Tahoe server, losing the metadata (document properties) in the process. Unresolved, this drawback seriously limits SPS's viability as a sole repository for business documents.

Resources

Microsoft has announced 13 partners who have trained consultants and created value-added products for SPS: Avanade, Cambridge Management Consulting, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Compaq, Dell, ePresence, Getronics, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, International Computers (ICL), Internosis, Ksolutions, and Unisys.

For more information on SPS, see www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/.

For a good white paper on SPS's use of Digital Dashboards, see www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/techinfo/DashSiteSharePoint.doc.

Developers interested in creating collaborative applications that utilize SPS can download the SharePoint Portal Service SDK from www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/downloads/tools/SDK.asp. An SPS Resource Kit will also be available later this summer.

Developers wanting to create additional Digital Dashboard components will require the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit 3.0, scheduled for release at the June 2001 Tech-Ed in Atlanta.