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 Sean Michael Kerner’s blog post interesting news on Open Source Vendor Jaspersoft -

According to JasperSoft, they are the world’s most widely deployed business intelligence (BI) software. It’s now also certified for Windows Server 2008.

In an announcement today, JasperSoft announced a new wide ranging partnership with Microsoft to ensure that JasperSoft’s BI solutions work well on Windows platforms. A key new initiative is something called JasperSoft ODBO Connect which according to JasperSoft enables Microsoft Excel to be used as a front-end for the JasperAnalysis data analysis server.