Microsoft has announced branding and RC1 availability for its forthcoming enterprise portal solution, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server - previously code-named "Tahoe".
SharePoint Portal Server allows companies to find, share and publish information, and provides knowledge portal integration with Microsoft Office, allowing enterprise customers to integrate document management, search, subscriptions and online discussions into their document collaboration process. The architecture, built on extensible Web Part technology, allows companies to build and extend intranet portals.
"Organizations today want to ensure that the valuable corporate knowledge stored in documents, Web servers, file servers and e-mail is readily available to employees making important decisions each day," says Jeff Teper, general manager of the SharePoint Portal Server Business Unit at Microsoft. "SharePoint Portal Server is a flexible, off-the-shelf solution that can search and index the most important enterprise content sources across an organization and make the information available to anyone in the company via a familiar user interface."
Based on search technologies from Microsoft Research, SharePoint Portal Server has broad support for enterprise content sources and data types so users can find information. SharePoint can index multiple content sources, including Web servers, file servers, Exchange public folders, Lotus Notes databases, and more, and present search results based on a probabilistic ranking algorithm. In addition, SharePoint Portal Server supports adaptive crawling, allowing the server to "learn" where information changes the most frequently on relevant sites.
"Our customers include large global corporations who need instant access to market and corporate information to make business decisions. However, finding that information is a challenge since it resides in heterogeneous sources scattered throughout their organizations," said Rick Fricchione, group practice vice president, Compaq Global Services. "Compaq is poised to provide SharePoint Portal Server solutions, including servers, storage and services, which will enable our customers to have rapid and easy access to mission-critical data to make effective business decisions."
In addition to its content aggregation technology, SharePoint Portal Server includes document management features that allow companies to incorporate business processes into their portal solution through check-in/check-out, version tracking and approval routing functionality.
Microsoft says that SharePoint Portal Server also allows users to search and index information stored in Web sites based on SharePoint Team Services, a new server-based team Web site solution from Microsoft that allows small teams and ad hoc groups to manage activities and work together effectively. Web sites based on SharePoint Team Services provide central locations for team members to share information such as calendaring, task assignments and announcements. Integration features in the upcoming releases of FrontPage and Office will allow team members to customise their sites and to incorporate information from the Office applications into their Web sites, the company says.
RC1 is now available for download from the Microsoft Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/ and will be the only release candidate before the final version, due later this year.
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