Until recently, most of the software industry's key players remained conspicuously absent from the portal marketplace. Now, there is a tide of releases changing this situation: IBM's WebSphere Portal Server, Lotus's K-station (which, at press time, was about to merge with WebSphere Portal Server) and Discovery Server, and Oracle9i AS Portal. With that tide has also come a portal from Microsoft: SharePoint Portal Server.

Microsoft SharePoint is both a portal and a content management system. The first release of the product is clearly not intended for large corporations to use as an enterprisewide portal involving large amounts of disparate data and many thousands of users. Considering the product is in its first release, however, it does contain a surprising amount of functionality, and it is a very cost-effective solution for Windows-centric departmental portal and content management applications.

USER INTERFACE

SharePoint has its own document management system, which is tightly integrated with Microsoft Office XP. The portal component of SharePoint consists of a Web server (called the "dashboard site") that is used to search and view content in SharePoint document stores ("workspaces") and content managed by external products such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange.

The dashboard site uses "Web parts" to assemble business content that portal users view. Web parts are reusable components that provide interfaces to the required information, applications, and services. A Web part contains either embedded code (HTML, VBscript, JScript, ActiveX control, or XML) for accessing the content, or a URL that points to the content. The portal user personalizes the Web interface by selecting the required Web parts from a catalog and defining how those Web parts are to be displayed on the user's screen. General screen layout and colors can be customized to meet corporate standards by modifying the default style sheets that come with the product. Given Microsoft's focus on Web services, it is reasonable to assume that a future release of SharePoint will tightly integrate Web parts into a Web services infrastructure.

Microsoft and third-party partners offer a wide range of Web parts for accessing business intelligence, CRM, and ERP applications, collaborative services, syndicated content, and so forth. I use a Web part from Correlate, for example, to organize office, email, and Web content associated with portal product technologies and products. (See Figure 1.) One key vendor relationship is with SAP Portals, which has enabled its interface components (SAP Portals' iViews) to operate as Web parts. Organizations can also develop their own custom Web parts using a provided development kit. Microsoft Office XP users can create Web parts by simply saving any Office object as a Web page.

Microsoft has for some time offered a free, but unsupported, Digital Dashboard Resource Kit (DDRK). The latest version of this kit, known as Microsoft SQL Server Digital Dashboard 3.0, can be used to build a portal for deployment on SQL Server 2000, rather than on SharePoint Portal Server. Web parts created with DDRK 3.0 can also be used in a SharePoint environment. One interesting point about the DDRK is that it lets you build a portal for mobile and wireless devices. It is reasonable to assume that this technology will be integrated into SharePoint in a future release.

DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Each dashboard server has an associated workspace that is maintained using the Microsoft Web Storage System. Portal metadata and user documents are organized in the workspace as a library of hierarchical folders. Remote client computers view these folders as "Web folders" and may access them using the WebDAV protocol.

Any tool that supports Web folders can be used to maintain documents in a workspace. You can, for example, use Microsoft Office XP and 2000 to create and maintain workspace documents such as Word files, PowerPoint presentations, and Excel pivot tables. These documents are stored in either standard or enhanced workspace folders. Standard folders operate the same way as regular Windows file folders, whereas enhanced folders offer additional facilities such as document check-in, check-out, versioning, and approval routing.

To edit a document, the user must first check it out. This version control prevents other users from modifying a document until the previous changes have been checked in. Every time a user checks in a document, SharePoint assigns it a new version number and archives the previous version. A document remains private until it is published for access via the dashboard site. A document can be published each time it is checked in, or the author can choose to check in private drafts and publish the document when it is complete.

The document management system includes an approval routing feature so you can have a document reviewed before publishing it. When an author publishes a document, it can be sent automatically to one or more people for review. Each person in the review process has the option of approving or rejecting the document. Each reviewer receives email notification when a document requires review. A Web discussion facility enables reviewers to conduct online discussions about a document under review. Comments and replies created during these discussions are stored together as threaded conversations.