The Future of Microsoft Content Management

By Brice Dunwoodie | Published Feb 13. 2004

There's some monkey business going on at Microsoft. I'm sure I'm not the first to notice that they are making a huge ruckus about SharePoint, which naturally ties in with the Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS), but one rarely ever hears much about MCMS. Finding collateral is not difficult. However, best of luck finding anything thats been generated in the last 8 months. What's going on Mr. Gates? ...we don't have the full answer, but we've just gotten a new clue today.

Published today in CRN is an article entitled "Microsoft Grounds Discovery Suite". If you don't know what "Discovery" is, then you may not know what "Voyager" or "Jupiter" are.

The short answer is they all describe some real or theorized format of Microsoft's E-Business Server suite. From most indications, MS' effort in this department have been a bit of a mess. There have been numerous missed deadlines (shocking), shuffles of products such as CMS from the server group to the office group, and shuffles of staff at the top level.

I wish I had more insight than I do at this point, because whatever story they finally weave for SharePoint, MCMS, BizTalk, Commerce, Office, etc., is sure to have a substantial impact on the market.

A couple of key extracts from the CRN article:

"We had to emphasize our portal strategy properly, so we prioritized that," [Eric Swift, director of product management for Microsoft's e-business servers]

In June, Microsoft said the Discovery suite would be delayed until 2005. However, the vendor has been silent about it since then.

Sources familiar with the plans said some of Discovery's baseline capabilities will be channeled into the next-generation Windows operating system, or Longhorn, while others will surface in highly interoperable server successors to the present lineup. Swift said it's too early to make decisions about the Longhorn server wave.

Read the Article.

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