Word of the Day : Windows SharePoint Server

Windows SharePoint Server (WSS), usually referred to as simply "Sharepoint," is a portal-based platform for creating, managing and sharing documents and customized Web services. WSS is available as a free download included with every Windows Server license. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) offers an increased set of capabilites that add to and build upon the core functionalities of WSS as an inducement for system administrators to upgrade.

Sharepoint was originally added on to Windows Server at the same time as Office XP under the title "SharePoint Team Services" or STS. STS was available as part of Microsoft FrontPage and could run on Windows 2000 Server or Windows XP. The 2.0 version advanced the functionality of the platform by storing both documents and meta data in a database and adding support for versioning for items held in document libraries, SQL Server and the .NET framework. This version of the software was downloaded and implemented at a rate unanticipated by Microsoft, as administrators adopted the platform as a relatively cheap and easy way to introduce collaborative document sharing and editing in Windows environments. Microsoft noted this use and embraced Sharepoint as the cornerstone of a strategy to embrace social computing, bringing Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis and social networking into enterprises without some of the security risks of Internet-based software as a service (SaaS) implementations.

Microsoft's Sharepoint competes against IBM's Notes and Quickr, Oracle's WebCenter Suite, Google Docs and CMS software from EMC, Adobe, Cisco and smaller startups like Socialtext and Zimbra. Many organizations are also exploring free, open source wiki software like MediaWiki, the application that underlies Wikipedia.

Critics of Sharepoint point out that certain features of Sharepoint Server 2007 will only work with the newest version of Microsoft Office, thereby forcing IT managers to upgrade their software. Sharepoint's lack of support for non-Microsoft formats, like files saved using Quark or Adobe Acrobat (.PDF), is a cause of concern for some administrators evaluating the suite as a potential enterprise-wide CMS. Microsoft has also been careful to avoid the bundling charges the company faced in the browser wars of the 1990s, separating WSS as a free download instead of including it with Windows Server.