SharePoint Portal Server (SPS), Microsoft’s product for hosting corporate portals, is getting a major makeover. Now in beta and expected in Oct. 2003, SPS 2003 is built on Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and takes advantage of WSS’s use of the .NET Framework and the SQL Server database to scale much better than its predecessor. However, the radical design changes will make obsolete the Web Parts built for SPS 2001, and the new product requires Windows 2003.

While the term corporate portal is broad, it frequently means an intranet or extranet that offers a single, well-organized starting point for the corporate information and applications needed by a particular user or group. Ideally, a corporate portal provides quick access to any resource a particular user needs to get work done, be it a document on a file server, a “self-service” front end to the human resources system, a report generated from a company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) system, or traffic information from a public Web site. (For more on how SPS and WSS fit into Microsoft’s portal and collaboration strategy, see “Portals: When Do I Need SPS?“.)

SharePoint Portal Server, Microsoft’s product for hosting corporate portals, is getting a major makeover. Now in beta and expected in late summer of 2003, SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003 is built on Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and, by taking advantage of WSS’s .NET technologies and the underlying SQL Server database, it scales much better than its predecessor, SPS 2001. However, the radical design changes will orphan the “Web Parts” built for SPS 2001, and the new product requires Windows 2003.

Although the term corporate portal is broad, it frequently means an intranet or extranet (an external Web site accessible only to authorized users) that provides a single, well-organized starting point for the corporate information and applications needed by a particular user or group. Ideally, a corporate portal provides quick access to any resource a particular user needs to get work done, be it a document on a file server, a “self-service” front end to the human resources system, a report generated from a company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) system, or traffic information from a public Web site. (For more on how SPS and WSS fit into Microsoft’s portal and collaboration strategy, see “Choosing Between WSS and SPS“.)