SharePoint is on fire across the country and across the globe. More and more organizations, especially in the Federal government and defense sector, are adopting or digging deeper into SharePoint implementations.

SharePoint has now made the vital jump to Microsoft Office interoperability and has been doing it for enough versions to have survived the "will it continue to be supported?" waiting period that many companies use as a measure of whether something is safe to adopt.

If you are not well versed in what SharePoint offers, it is worth your time to pay some attention, as it might well be in your future. The big draw is that SharePoint takes a big chunk of unstructured data off the file servers and puts it into structured SQL Server storage. A lot of really useful extra functionality comes with it, such as content-based search, user maintainable meta-data, versioning and powerful collaboration functionality for things like creating project Web sites.

SharePoint is a glue technology that holds together database storage in SQL Server, Web provisioning for easy manipulation, and, as I mentioned before, easy integration with Microsoft Office. Support for lists and document versioning make it very easy to justify in project-based environments, where a portal for team coordination and document libraries for data consolidation make sense.

WSS supports blogs, which help subject matter experts share their insights without clogging in-boxes, calendaring for coordinating events and milestones, wikis that help form the basis for documentation once a project is completed, surveys to gain consensus from the team without a time-wasting meeting, presence to facilitate ad hoc meetings, and issue tracking to keep the problems with any project in sight. This is the Swiss Army knife of collaboration solutions and provides some major building blocks for customization.

In recent years Microsoft has been pitching out a lot against the technology wall and watching to see if it sticks. Even small success has carved out quite a few spaces and competitive scenarios, but SharePoint has hit a sweet spot, it seems. There are competitors, but most of them are only point solutions that address a small part of what SharePoint provides.

SharePoint is on its way to becoming the next killer application. It is all about collaboration and acceleration of information sharing. Should you need help or have questions about implementing, customizing or hosting Windows SharePoint Services email John Kisha or call toll free at 1-800-561-3197.

Parts of the above has been excerpted from an article by Patrick Hynds originally published on Systems Management News, July 15, 2008.