Microsoft's Intranet Portal Innovates (back issue)

I had the pleasure, at the invitation of John Amyotte, Microsoft's Solutions Specialist for Portals, to see Microsoft's very own main intranet portal, microsoftweb. As can be expected, MS is “eating their own dog food” and using their own portal product SharePoint and Windows SharePoint Services to power their internal business hub.

microsoftweb is very well executed and organized and features significant improvements over previous iterations. What stood-out most is the use of personalization and profiling that makes the retrieval and presentation of information far more relevant to the individual user.

A link on the home page called My Site (the portal recognizes the user based on their Windows login – of course, MS uses single sign-in) links to John's personal website that his both a 'public' view (what those in the company see) and a 'personal' view (links and information that only he sees. The presentation and the type of information presented is customized by the individual user including news, stock ticker, presentations, etc.

microsoftweb also features a single search engine — used for both finding people and their contact information (directory information) and general intranet pages and documents (enterprise search). When doing a search the results are divided into two columns: the first column highlights search results that are relevant intranet pages and documents; the second column produces results that are all MS employees and links to their respective sites and information that are relevant to the search query (a thumbnail photo of each person is also presented).

Most impressive about microsoftweb and the Sharepoint offering is the collaboration tools inherent to the product. Among other things Sharepoint offers a template for team meetings that store relevant documents, list team members, account for member attendance, trigger reminder emails for meetings, etc.

There are currently 31 million Sharepoint users the world-over. Moreover, Microsoft isn't resting on their laurels: Gates & company are investing the bulk of a $700 million project and a dedicated team of some 300 people to beefing-up Sharepoint and fully integrating a new and improved content management system (Content Management Server as it is known today).

Lookout Plumtree and SAP!

Microsoft's Intranet Portal Innovates