It has been more than two years since I first wrote about SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal in this column. At that time, Microsoft just had released its second-generation collaboration product, upgraded from what had been called "Team Services." The products were Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 2.0 and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003. The first was a "free" component of Windows Server 2003. The latter was a more robust server product layered on top of WSS. SharePoint provided a feature-rich, Web-based collaborative environment tightly coupled with the latest release of Microsoft Office.

The landscape has changed significantly in the last few years. SharePoint now is part of the Microsoft Office product line as opposed to being a server product. The next release (Microsoft Office SharePoint Services [MOSS] 2007 and Portal 2007) is expected by the first of the year. Has Microsoft ever released a product with a calendar-year-based name in January of that year? Not that I can recall. This may be monumental. Meanwhile, SharePoint has become an incredibly hot topic in the corporate world. My phone rings almost daily simply because the name SharePoint pops up a few times in my C.V. SharePoint kept a very low profile the first few years it was around. I think no one could decide exactly what it was good for. Out of the box, all it appeared to do was give non-tech-savvy users the ability to create and manage little Web sites consisting of document libraries, lists, and a few other goodies. And so SharePoint languished for a while. The vision was there–collaboration–yet for some time no one seemed to get it but Microsoft, and while the folks at Microsoft may eat their own dog food, they don't pay a lot for the food they consume.

So, why is SharePoint such a hot topic right now, and why is the corporate world willing to throw a ton of money at it? Two reasons:

1. The software (WSS) really is free! All you need is some space on a 2003 Server, SQL Server 2000 (with service packs), and client computers with Office 2003.

2. It really is a powerful collaboration tool.

I think most early SharePoint users were determined to use it for large enterprisewide applications such as content management systems or intranet portals controlled by corporate IT. I was involved in a complex integration of SharePoint Portal with Microsoft Content Management Server. It was, after all, a server application, and it is the duty of corporate IT to control all server applications. As a result, SharePoint was deployed only in high-profile applications with the correct ROI and appropriate controls on its use and access. And the truth is SharePoint (Portal or WSS) is a very good product for large enterprise projects. But that is not where it really shines. Where SharePoint has the ability to strut its stuff is in the hands of "ordinary" corporate users. Gasp . . . heresy . . . turn an application over to end users? Yep.

A Windows SharePoint Services installation provides the system administrator the ability to create a "top-level" Web site on the SharePoint (virtual) server. Once that site is created, the owners of that site have the ability to modify it in thousands of ways using standard SharePoint admin tools. If the owners have FrontPage 2003, their ability to modify that site is unlimited. And I imagine that's how it all started. Bob in accounting gets his buddy Adam in IT to create a top-level site for him. Bob then takes that site and creates a Sarbanes-Oxley reference site for his fellow accounting geeks. Bob does not need to know how to write any code, any HTML, or any IT stuff at all to create his custom SOX site. Soon, accountants from the St. Louis office get wind of Bob's site and want to create their own site as an addendum to Bob's. They don't have any friends in IT, so they just get Bob to create a subsite for them. And so on . . . like viral marketing . . . SharePoint communities evolved.

Employee groups with common interests and goals are not always able to meet and share notes because they work in different geographical locations or have different work schedules. But an intranet site built around common areas of practice or interest provides that opportunity. An additional benefit is the sense of ownership that comes from a group having its own Web site–a Web site over which the group has total control.

Not since early versions of Visual Basic has a product emerged that allows users with no real technical background to create "applications" that really work. In this case, the application is a Web site. How is this possible? Can we really give business users their own generic or empty Web site and expect them to build and maintain it? Absolutely. I have seen WSS sites that are not only useful but well designed and with varying degrees of complexity. I have seen sites that have lots and lots of traffic–users want to access these sites because they own them. You may find there are a lot of wannabe geeks in your business community who are more than willing to create self-service Web sites.

IT can and will maintain control of the servers and other applications running on that server. A central IT authority can create and issue basic WSS sites to interested groups or business units. Site creation is as simple as a few mouse clicks using SharePoint administration. Site owners or administrators are given access to that site only. The administrators then have full control over that site. What they do or don't do with their site has no significant effect on other sites or applications running on the server. Using only SharePoint-provided tools, they quickly and easily can change the look and feel of the site. SharePoint Web sites (and pages) are all virtual. Modifications made to a site are stored in a database–not on the file system. The only "things" that exist in the file system are the basic page and Web-part templates.

SharePoint pages are Web-part pages. Sites can be modified by simply dragging and dropping Web parts from a Web-part "browser" to their desired location on the Web page. Properties of individual Web parts are modified easily by changing their "properties." Once I drop an RSS Web part on my page, all I need to do is type in a URL, and magically I have the local weather forecast or a stock ticker on my page. This really is a lot like VB3, only instead of creating Windows forms, we are creating Web pages.

When a site is developed, there are some half-dozen templates that can be used to produce the generic site. Using admin tools, the site owners then can generate document libraries, to-do lists, schedules, task lists, custom lists, discussion boards, and new Web pages, Web-part pages, and site and work spaces. Custom themes and views can be created. The site owners have complete control over who has access to the site and what that level of access is. If you are working in an Active Directory environment, users don't even need to log in to the site once they are authenticated on the network. Individual users can create their own personal view of the site. If you really don't want the RSS feed with the weather in Hartford, you can change your view to show the weather in Minneapolis.

Windows SharePoint Services is a no-cost server add-on. And using WSS, you can accomplish all we have talked about so far and more. So what's the deal? Why would you want to upgrade to Windows SharePoint Portal Server? SPS adds a layer or two on top of WSS. It provides the ability to search across all SharePoint sites and to create a robust portal instead of individual sites. It offers greater scalability and the ability to support Web-farm deployments. It allows users to create personal sites and integrates well with other LOB applications using Microsoft BizTalk. It enables single sign-on for increased security (WSS relies solely on IIS authentication). You get a lot of added features with the portal product–but I am not sure you always get enough to justify the cost.

SharePoint Portal is licensed per server and per user, so while the server license may be reasonable, it is possible to spend some serious money when you add in all the Client Access Licenses (CALs). However, if you are going to use SharePoint for anything but the viral collaboration sites described earlier, Portal probably is the way to go. There are a number of third-party WSS add-ons that can provide all the functionality of SPS (such as search), but there are important reasons to get the whole Microsoft product. The most compelling one is WSS 2007. The soon-to-be-released SharePoint product is the real deal. And the logical migration path is from a pure Microsoft product to the new product.

Indeed, with MOSS 2007 due out any day, why talk about a product that is a few years old? There are a couple of reasons. First and foremost, most organizations really don't want to be early adopters of any major software release. Let someone else iron out the kinks. How many of you already are planning your migration to Vista? I thought so . . . corporate IT is not going to line up in the street to move thousands of users to a new operating system. To exploit the benefits of MOSS 2007 fully, you need to have your users running Vista and Office 2007. Whoops . . . not ready for that yet, either, are you?

Second, WSS 2.0 and SPS 2003 still are viable products I see being rolled out in Fortune 500 companies every day. It took a while for SharePoint to reach the tipping point, but now that it has, you are going to see continued growth in the product line. I suspect Microsoft will have some difficulty selling the "old" Portal product unless it is willing to offer an attractive upgrade, but WSS probably will remain the standard for intranet collaboration for the next year or so. After that is an easy upgrade to 2007.

The real value of SharePoint is the ability it enables for business users to create their own communities of interest and empower themselves with technology solutions to common problems–without having to obtain assistance from already overburdened IT departments. It is a tool that truly allows knowledge workers to use technology in a way that best suits their needs. The needs of claims adjusters working on the Gulf Coast are not the same as adjusters working in fire-ravaged areas of California. No group should be forced to use a cookie-cutter collaboration site provided by IT. Each special interest group throughout the enterprise can create a site that best suits its needs. After all, who best is aware of the needs of business users but business users themselves? Besides, after you provide the organization with tools that make business units able to control their own technology solutions, they actually might have something good to say about corporate IT. Or not.

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