Chapter 3. Microsoft s Portal Strategy

Chapter 3. Microsoft's Portal Strategy

For several years , Microsoft has marched forward on the long journey from a desktop software company to a provider of enterprise solutions. Despite its dominance of desktop operating system and office productivity software, the company has had an uphill struggle to gain respect and market share in the enterprise software market. Microsoft has played the underdog to Oracle in the database market, the upstart to BEA in the enterprise application integration (EAI) market, and second fiddle to Sun and Unix in e-commerce and web servers. Only with the advent of .NET and the generation of server products that began after Windows 2000 Server has Microsoft boasted a comprehensive enterprise platform and serious competition for IBM, Oracle, Sun, and other market leaders .

Microsoft faces the same struggle to achieve recognition as a portal platform vendor as it faced to become an enterprise software player. It came late to the portal market, and some of its early technology and branding choices did little to improve the image of Microsoft in the portal market. Too much of Microsoft's image for portals was wrapped around a single product ”SharePoint Portal Server. If you had searched the Microsoft website for "portal" in early 2003, most of the pages you would have found would have related to SharePoint Portal Server. Reading reviews of the first version of SharePoint compared to leading enterprise portal products would have made you think that Microsoft's products were not serious contenders against the IBMs or even the Plumtrees of the world and that Microsoft had totally missed the portal boat. What product did Microsoft offer in 2001 or 2003 that compared to those of IBM, BroadVision, Epicentric, or Plumtree? Customers and analysts could have easily concluded that Microsoft was not serious about portals.

This conclusion would be erroneous, however, for two reasons. First, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is a fundamentally new product, with a scalable, high-performance architecture and a raft of features. Second, and more important, SharePoint is merely the tip of the iceberg of Microsoft's portal platform. Many portal features and services are already provided by other Microsoft servers. Indeed, the misunderstanding of Microsoft's portal approach and the value of .NET as a solid portal platform are key reasons why this book is needed.

This chapter reviews past and present Microsoft portal strategy and emerging elements of its new approach. To maximize the life of your portal investment, you need to know which products and technologies will be supported in the future and which are merely temporary stopgaps or even dead ends.