Competing Microsoft Products Cause Collaboration Confusion

With the nearly simultaneous release of Microsoft SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server added to the already-available Exchange 2000, Microsoft now has three products that offer substantially similar document-centric collaborative features. Certainly an organization could choose any one of these products as the basis for a collaboration solution, especially one built around Office-based business documents. But before choosing a product, organizations need to understand Microsoft’s overall collaboration strategy, and which collaborative products Microsoft is likely to support for the long term.

Microsoft’s Collaboration Strategy

The Webster definition of collaboration, “to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor,” applies in some way to almost every Microsoft product. For example, in Office XP, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have a “Send to…” feature that allows a document author to send the document to a mail recipient for review or to an Exchange public folder for posting. Project 2000, which is part of the Office family, has its own Web portal (Project Central) for collaborative project status reporting and task management. Exchange Conferencing Server and NetMeeting support audio and video conferencing, whiteboards, and application sharing. Programming tools allow developers to create custom workflow applications that enforce a process or business rules into a collaboration solution based on either Exchange or SQL Server. And now, the two new SharePoint products further extend Microsoft’s collaboration technologies.