• Sidebar: Linking Content Management Server to SharePoint

New versions of SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) and SharePoint Team Server (STS), Microsoft's products for corporate portals and team Web sites, respectively, will integrate more tightly with one another and adopt a more scalable Web Part technology for Web content. Due in mid-2003, the new products could particularly strengthen Microsoft in the market for corporate portals—modular, customizable Web sites that provide single, well-organized starting points to corporate information for particular users. However, the new products will require the upcoming Windows .NET Server, and companies might face challenges converting existing portals to the new technology.

Microsoft also announced a new licensing model for the current version of SPS that will make it more viable for use on extranets, corporate portals designed to serve a company's customers or partners.

New Web Part Technology in Windows .NET Server

The central new element of Microsoft's portal and collaboration strategy is improved technology for Web Parts. Web Parts are modular Web page components that display information from particular applications (e.g., a report from an enterprise resource planning [ERP] system) or from a content source (such as a news feed or a document repository). Web Parts allow organizations to quickly build highly customized portals because their modularity makes them easy to assemble with little or no coding, and organizations can choose from a wide range of prebuilt third-party Web Parts that link to most of the popular business applications, such as SAP and Seibel.

(For more background on Web Parts and their use in Microsoft's products, see "Corporate Portal Strategy in Flux" on page 3 of the Nov. 2001 Update.)

The new Web Part technology will use Microsoft's ASP.NET Web server and the .NET Development Platform. ASP.NET offers many advantages over the older Active Server Pages (ASP) technology used by SPS 2001’s Web Parts. In particular, ASP.NET should provide faster execution, better security, and easier development of Web Parts. (For more information on ASP.NET, see the Feb. 2002 Research Report, "The .NET Development Platform.")

However, many current Web Parts, built on today’s ASP technology, will not work on ASP.NET because it does not support the programming languages (such as Visual Basic Scripting Edition) used to create current Web Parts. Although ASP.NET and ASP can run side by side on the same server, the new SharePoint releases will use only ASP.NET-based Web Parts. Microsoft claims that migrating existing Web Parts to ASP.NET will be relatively easy for some but could require complete rewrites for others. ISVs that sell Web Parts will have to carefully consider the payback period on investments in the older Web Part technology and begin making plans to migrate their Web Parts to the new technology.

Companies should also note that the new Web Part technology will require Windows .NET Server. Although ASP.NET can be installed and run on Windows 2000 servers, Microsoft has no plans to make the new ASP.NET Web Part technology run on Windows 2000.

Portal Server to Get Better Personalization, Scalability

In mid-2003 Microsoft will ship a new release of SPS that, because it exploits ASP.NET-based Web Parts, will require Windows .NET Server and will not run on Windows 2000.

The new SPS will continue to use a Web Store database for storing documents, but will utilize SQL Server to store the indexes used when searching for information. Eventually, after SQL Server’s Yukon database engine is released, a future release of SPS will likely use SQL Server to perform both functions.

Other improvements will include the following:

Personalization. In the new release, the portal can be customized for each user, and users will be able to change the look of some parts of their portal pages, while the portal administrator controls other parts.

BizTalk Server integration. SPS Web Parts will be able to communicate with back-end applications through BizTalk Server, Microsoft's application integration product. This will allow developers to exploit BizTalk Server's protocol translation, data reformatting, and transaction management functions to tie Web Parts into applications in a more manageable way. The new version will also allow BizTalk to map SPS users’ identities to directories other than Active Directory, thus giving portal users single sign-on access to applications that require authorization.

Improved scalability. SPS could prove more scalable and robust, thanks in part to ASP.NET and SQL Server. SPS will also support a two-tier Web server/database server architecture, with load balancing in the Web server tier. However, Microsoft has not indicated whether the new release will support a more distributed architecture (similar to the way Active Directory or Exchange can replicate data to many sites). Although the current SPS can use several servers to perform different functions, it is basically a single-site solution, which can lead to performance problems when the content it needs to index or the users retrieving documents from it reside on other sites joined by low-bandwidth WAN links.

Tighter integration with Content Management Server (CMS). Microsoft claims the new SPS release will also integrate better with a future version of CMS, Microsoft’s software for managing complex Web sites, but no details have yet been released. (See the sidebar "Linking Content Management Server to SharePoint" for more on how the current versions of two products can be integrated.)

Microsoft has also not stated whether it will improve backup and restore, or bulk document migration—areas where the current SPS product is weak.

Team Server Gets Web Parts, Document Management

The new ASP.NET Web Part technology will also be used by the next version of SharePoint Team Server, Microsoft’s product for "team collaboration" Web sites that help team members work together on documents, host discussions, post announcements, and conduct surveys. Web Parts will make it easier for nontechnical team leaders to customize their STS sites using a set of bundled Web Parts specifically tailored for the needs of teams, instead of using FrontPage to customize Web page templates as in the current STS.

Microsoft has not said whether some of the new generation of Web Parts might work on both STS and SPS, but this seems likely. Like SPS, the next version of STS will also require .NET Server.

Other STS improvements will include the following:

Automatic registering with SPS. Although the two SharePoint products can be integrated now, Microsoft plans to tighten their integration in the next release. For example, a newly created STS site will automatically register itself with a SPS server so that the SPS search engine will index the new STS site.

(For detailed information on how the current releases of STS and SPS integrate in an intranet scenario, see msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?URL=/downloads/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/001/816/msdncompositedoc.xml.)

Document management. STS users will get document management features similar to SPS, such as check-in/check-out and versioning.

Presence information. STS sites will capture "presence" information about team members, allowing them to strike up chats or make voice calls. However, STS will not be integrated with MSN Messenger or Windows instant messaging.

Portal Server Extranet Licensing

Microsoft will offer a new licensing option for SPS 2001—the "SharePoint Portal Server External Connector for Non-Employees"—beginning July 2002. Until now, organizations wanting to use SPS to create a portal for use by customers, suppliers, or other partners had to purchase Client Access Licenses (CALs) for each user, thereby severely limiting the practicality of SPS for this type of portal. The US$30,000 per server External Connector, in contrast, does not require CALs. However, portals running under this license can only serve non-employees, where the term employees includes independent contractors, agents, vendors, service providers, subsidiaries, or affiliates working with or for the organization.