SharePoint Goes .NET

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.