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WSS Isn't Just For Collaboration

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A number of times, people have said that we can solve the problem of confusion around the word “SharePoint” by just getting rid of the word.  For example, we could just have “Portal Server” stand on it’s own, and we could rename WSS “Windows Collaboraiton Services”.  In fact, our own Windows Server team at one point considered creating a server role entitled “Collaboration Server” for the upcoming R2 release of Windows Server 2003 (which will have WSS packaged inside of it).

It’s tempting, but it’s too limiting. Repeat after me:  SharePoint Services is a platform.  The collaboration solution is just something we shipped on top of it.

WSS’ platform is for far more than collaboration.  Is BizTalk Server’s Business Activity Monitor (BAM) collaboration?  No.  Are Microsoft Business Solutions’ various Business Portals collaboration?  No.  Heck, is SharePoint Portal Server collab tech?  No.

For business value audiences, talking about WSS as collaboration technology is fine.  But what WSS really offers you is a way for developing and deploying highly repeatable Web site solutions.  Sites that consume very little incremental overhead.  Sites that are accessible by both smart clients and browsers.  Sites that provide a large set of built-in storage and tool resources.  In other words:  SharePoint sites.  They’re something new (well, new in 2003), and something special.

You can (and should) use SharePoint site technology to build many kinds of applications.  Yes, many problem spaces to which we’re well suited involve collaboration (Visual Studio Team System, Class Server, Project Server, Brightwork, etc.), but to confine our value to collaboration is far too limiting.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2005
    It is refreshing to read this coming from the Microsoft camp. It seems that everytime you mention Sharepoint people immediately think collaboration.

    My team is pushing our department to think of Portal Server as a product for delivering sites. We want our Sharepoint implementation to be just as important of a piece of our technology portfolio as our email system, database system, search system.

    Hearing Microsoft communicate the strength of Sharepoint to it's customers as a rapid deployment architecture for sites is a welcome bit of news.
  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2005
    Great article Mike. Have you seen my two latest articles (somewhat related):

    http://www.sharepointblogs.com/bmixon/archive/2005/03/12/1429.aspx
    http://www.sharepointblogs.com/bmixon/archive/2005/03/13/1437.aspx
  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2005
    You are my new best friend.
  • Anonymous
    March 18, 2005
    Is there a possibility to add document level security. Please check my blog for an short description of the problem.
  • Anonymous
    March 24, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 26, 2005
    Great post!

    I even used SharePoint Team Services as a platform back in the day:
    http://www.bksquash.com
    http://reservoir.the-river.org

    And for WSS, there's http://dev.collutions.com/blogs/sample (a Blog site definition).