The Windows SharePoint Services Foundation

Heading into a new year, it’s always good for companies to reflect on what worked well in the past year, so they can build on that success. For Microsoft in 2005, one of the biggest winners was SharePoint Products & Technologies.

Today more than 600 systems integrators (SIs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) are building portal and collaboration solutions which utilize Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, and more than 350 partners are extending the functionality of Windows SharePoint Services specifically for their solutions.

According to Kurt DelBene, corporate vice president of the Office Server Group at Microsoft, the extensibility of Windows SharePoint Services is a conscious design choice to create a product that takes advantage of the industry’s rich ecosystem of solution providers and highly specialized software developers.

“We have designed Windows SharePoint Services with the foundational components that enable customers and partners to develop solutions for collaboration, content management and portals,” DelBene says.

One of the key strengths of Windows SharePoint Services lies in the fact that it is an integrated part of the Microsoft Windows Server System, meaning that developers don’t have to work with separate products and integrate them to create the functionality they desire.

“WSS provides the foundational components out of the box to support collaboration, workflow, team sites and document management,” DelBene says. “This is great for developers because they don’t have to spend their engineering resources to develop those foundational elements. They can put their efforts into developing and extending that functionality to create their specific solutions.”

Customers are asking for more flexible and interoperable systems and the ability to customize our products for their specific end-user solutions. To aid in this effort, Microsoft has made available a set of free Windows SharePoint Services application templates, which customers and partners around the world are now using as an extensible, customizable basis for their end-user solutions. According to a Microsoft survey, more than 400,000 template downloads have taken place since the 30 applications templates were released in August 2005.

And according to DelBene, the future could be even brighter for Windows SharePoint Services. Already a long list of companies have announced their intentions to build solutions for the upcoming release of WSS. These companies include industry leaders in ECM solutions such as Interwoven, Canadian-based Hummingbird Ltd., and European-based Meridio.”

As more companies begin to work with these solutions, says DelBene, they will find new ways to utilize SharePoint’s capabilities to help their businesses. And with so many partners working to build and integrate solutions based on SharePoint technologies, Microsoft is receiving a great deal of feedback on ways to improve the product.