I was interested to see this article in the Wall St. Journal confirming the established position of Microsoft's greatest stealth technology - SharePoint 2007.

Several of the Scottish Microsoft Partners I work with closely have invested huge time and effort in preparing for the latest iteration of SharePoint technologies which became broadly available earlier this year. Charteris, Avanade Scotland and Company Net are all working on Sharepoint 2007 solutions for customers which to be delivered imminently.

Chelford SFM have built a fantastic "Sharepoint Test Drive" which allows customers to quickly get to grips with how they can use SharePoint to

"create a single interface to a common environment within which documents and files can be managed, information and data collected and presented, users can collaborate and communicate in virtual spaces and global document searches are carried out with relative ease" - David Gardiner, Director, Chelford Solutions for Microsoft

Through Machiavellian Microsoft software licensing agreements, many companies find that their employees are entitled to use the Standard version of SharePoint 2007. Jeff Teper, the VP of Microsoft's SharePoint product group who has been most helpful to Microsoft Scottish customers as the SharePoint technologies have evolved throughout the current decade, claims 85 million SharePoint licenses across 17,000 companies are in circulation.

Microsoft's customers and partners have a great opportunity to make better use of the new capabilities they have inherited in Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. These capabilities are very wide in scope and potential business impact.

More specifically SharePoint is a modular toolset covering the popular enterprise information management categories of Collaboration, Portal, Business Intelligence, and Content management. To this it adds Search, Business Forms and Workflow capabilities, and architectural support for Intranet, Internet and Extranet deployment. The icing on the cake is that this wide-ranging information management platform works closely with the Office desktop, meaning that end-users can very quickly be productive with new applications built on Sharepoint.

As such, not only can SharePoint be used to address the "usual" content management and information access problems that exist in any organisation, it can also be used as a common platform to build business process solutions which rely on workflow, forms and structured data. The application templates on TechNet, and the huge volume of Microsoft Partner value added SharePoint solutions on the Office Solution directory are testament to this.

The sheer scale of these capabilities can be disconcerting for those considering SharePoint technologies as a solution to business issues. To those I would recommend attending one of Chelford's test drive events in Glasgow or Edinburgh, or if you prefer to DIY sign up for a hosted Office Live site.

Link to Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software - WSJ.com