"My favorite Office thing today is how SharePoint is being used for collaboration," Gates told the 800 independent software vendor (ISV) representatives attending the three-day event at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters. "SharePoint is one of the most underutilized assets of the Office system."
There are two different Microsoft products that share the SharePoint name. SharePoint Services — the Web-based team collaboration environment that Microsoft has decided it will build into future versions of Windows, starting with Windows Server "R2," due out next year — is the base-level SharePoint product. SharePoint Portal Server (SPPS) builds on top of SharePoint Services and provides indexing and management tools for SharePoint-based sites.
Microsoft claims SharePoint Portal Server is one of its fastest selling products of all time. According to Microsoft estimates, there already are more than 350 software vendors and 180 systems integrators reselling SharePoint-based solutions.
Microsoft officials have characterized SharePoint as "the killer app for XML."
Demonstrating to developers how they can make use of the SharePoint Web parts and its application programming interfaces in designing their own applications was a key theme of this week's Office Devcon.
Gates told keynote attendees to expect Microsoft to more tightly integrate SharePoint with other Microsoft technologies and point products, going forward. He said to expect SharePoint and Active Server Pages (ASP) to "become closer," and SharePoint and SQL Server to become more entwined, as well.
Gates also said to Microsoft will make SharePoint a key element of its evolving, integrated workflow, document management and digital rights platforms.
Gates said to expect SharePoint and Microsoft's Windows future Windows File System (WinFS) technologies to evolve in parallel. Until last year, WinFS was slated to be a key element of Windows Longhorn. In August, Microsoft decided to postpone its delivery and currently has not assigned a new delivery vehicle or due date for the technology.
Gates discussed Microsoft's quest for unified storage of all types of data, ranging from files to e-mail and emphasized that SQL Server would be the ultimate repository for storing this type of data.
As "SharePoint evolves up on the server and WinFS evolves down to the client," Microsoft will be able to realize its unified storage goal, Gates told attendees.
The SharePoint team is working on its next release of both SharePoint Services and SPPS. On tap is more and better integration between SharePoint and other business applications, especially content management, Microsoft officials have said. Microsoft also is working to deliver a Visual Studio Team System 2005 template for SharePoint team collaboration/team development by the time Visual Studio 2005 ships this summer.
During the rest of his keynote, Gates emphasized Microsoft's multi-pronged plan to achieve interoperability with its products, both by adhering to standards and by designing XML support into many of its flagship products, including Windows, Office and SQL Server.
On Thursday, Gates released one of his periodic "Executive E-mail" missives to customers and partners that outlined the same interoperability messages that he detailed in his Office Devcon keynote.
He also put Microsoft's forthcoming Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 technology though its demo paces. And he talked up Microsoft's "Elixir" effort to integrate the Outlook user interface on Microsoft's internal Siebel CRM system. Microsoft is in the midst of rolling out the first version of Elixir to 1,000 members of its own salesforce, and has said it will provide the same technology to interested customers and partners for their own use.
