Microsoft Enterprise Software Group

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While SharePoint became the lightning rod for Microsoft portal criticism, the Enterprise Software Group was quietly assembling the server products that make up a solid part of the portal platform. This part of the company was responsible for Commerce Server 2002, Content Management Server, BizTalk Server, and more.

The Enterprise Software Group is the source of the products used to define a portal framework from the top down rather than starting with individual and workgroup productivity tools. Products from this group lead Microsoft products in terms of security, scalability, and raw performance, as one would expect from an enterprise product team. The team also charted a path to .NET that made the server products more consistent for developers and administrators.

Table 3.1 shows how all the products fit together into the portal roadmap.

Table 3.1. Microsoft Product Map for Portals

Microsoft Product/Feature	Windows 2000 / 2003 / Active Directory	Commerce Server	SPS v2	WSS	CMS	SQL Server	Exchange	BizTalk
Look-and-feel			X	X	X
User profile	X		X				X
Personalization	X	X	X
Content management			X	X
Taxonomy		X	X
Application integration	X		X			X		X
Database repository						X
Support for transactions								X
Workflow			X		X			X
Collaboration tools			X	X			X
Search engine	X		X				X

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