The Business Intelligence Blog

Think of SharePoint as the jack-of-all-trades in the business software realm. Companies use it to create Web sites and then manage content for those sites. It can help workers collaborate on projects and documents. And it has a variety of corporate search and business intelligence tools too.

Microsoft wraps all of this software up into a package and sells the bundle at a reasonable price. In fact, the total cost of the bundle often comes in below what specialist companies would charge for a single application in, say, the business intelligence or corporate search fields.

While Microsoft’s Windows sales fell for the first time in history this year, its SharePoint sales have gone up. Microsoft declines to break out the exact sales figures for the software but said that SharePoint broke the $1 billion revenue mark last year and continued to rise past that total this year, making it the hottest selling server-side product ever for the company.

Companies like Ferrari, Starbucks and Viacom have used SharePoint to create their public-facing Web sites and for various other tasks. All told, more than 17,000 customers use SharePoint.

More from NY Times.

From RedmondMag article on Microsoft’s Sharepoint

Financially, SharePoint represents a big plus in Microsoft’s product stack. The SharePoint 2007 product generated $800 million in revenues in Microsoft’s fiscal-year 2007, Creese said. That figure is $50 million more than the total revenue generated by Salesforce.com — a hosted customer relationship management solution provider — in its fiscal-year 2008, he added.

Creese offered a caveat for organizations expecting SharePoint to work right out of the box. The solution may require some customization to meet an organization’s needs.

“SharePoint has been a huge success in the market,” Creese said. “However, what we’re starting to find is that a high-tuned SharePoint installation requires custom coding and third-party” support, including perhaps third-party software.

This is probably very evident as more and more corporations move to Sharepoint. Sharepoint is sort-of becoming the ubiquitous tool for Enterprise Content Management . The biggest advantage that Microsoft has with Sharepoint is that they serve as repositories for documents, which are created using their own flagship product, MS-Office.

Having worked with Sharepoint in the last three+ years, it has proved to be a great tool and it still has huge opportunities for improvement. And as the article rightly points out, its a wake-up call for Lotus Notes. I’m sure Lotus Notes engineers are burning enough midnight oil to pull up their market share. Read more at Computer World -

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 is the fastest growing product in the company’s history and seems to have as many uses as a Swiss Army knife. Its six focus areas are collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management (ECM), business process management and business intelligence. (Compare collaboration products.)

Just last month, Microsoft added a hosted alternative to fuel adoption. There is a “perfect storm,” observers say, around SharePoint in terms of the popularity of Web-based computing, demand for less-expensive ECM and portal tools, collaboration technology and integration around Microsoft’s Office suite.