Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Designer 2007
Today we announced the naming and packaging for the next release of the Office system products including Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Designer 2007. Please check out the press release materials.
Most of the stuff in the materials is self-explanatory, but I thought I'd talk about the evolution from "Office SharePoint Portal Server" to "Office SharePoint Server" as people might wonder about it. First, we thought simpler was better - it is one less word! Second, the features above WSS are expanding so much - the new CMS \ SPS integration and other portal, content mangmenet, collaboration, search, business process and intelligence features - that we thought "portal" was a little narrow to be the umbrella name. We also made the investments I talked about the Light-Up Not Just Roll-Up post to make sure these features applied to all the sites in your organization not just top-level portals.
I do want to make sure though that the support for portals does not get lost in the change. In particular, I would particularly highlight the new CMS features (err Office SharePoint Server Web Publishing features - gotta get used to that), personalization and MySite capabilities, LOB integration and enhanced internet and extranet support (things like pluggable authentication) that expand SharePoint's value is the leading enterprise portal solution.
The other thing that I get asked about a lot is the difference between SPS and WSS. There is a good overview here but I think think this gets simpler in the next release with all the extra features and light-up support. We did think about not using "SharePoint" in both Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server but we felt that would caused confusion because Office SharePoint Server is so clearly built on WSS.
Lastly, since it is a common question, Beta 2 will be available in the first half of 2006 - please register for that at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview - with final release by the end of 2006.
It has been a busy week - I was going to try to get another post up about the Office Live service for small business and its use of Windows SharePoint Services but that will have to wait a couple of days.
-- Jeff
