In this scenario old workhorses like Word and Excel become rich clients for SharePoint 2007, the latest release of Microsoft’s enterprise portal product. Hence Microsoft’s new product is called 2007 Office System, rather than merely Office. It is a potent strategy, though adopters risk vendor lock-in along with an expensive upgrade cycle if they use it to the full.
The centrepiece of the Office System is SharePoint, a set of services built on top of ASP.Net, the Windows web application server. SharePoint has many faces. It is a portal server, which lets users assemble intranet sites by snapping together “web parts”, bringing together diverse streams of enterprise data and allowing extensive user customisation as well as “Web 2.0” features such as blogs and wikis. SharePoint is also a replacement for the traditional file share, adding key features such as document history, commenting and discussion, alerting, fine-grained permissions and advanced search.
