Windows SharePoint Services

While SPS provides collaborative services for portal and document management, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) provides out-of-the-box functionality for project teams , including event calendars, discussions, document libraries (without the level of document management that SPS provides), and surveys. The nice thing about WSS is that users can easily modify a site by using Microsoft FrontPage. You can integrate WSS with SPS through the Digital Dashboard or through the search capabilities in SPS. With SPS 2.0, which is scheduled for release in late 2003, SPS and WSS are more tightly integrated.

Mobile Information Server

With the explosive growth of wireless communications, collaborative applications must be designed to be accessible on mobile devices. The product that helps facilitate this access is Microsoft Mobile Information Server (MIS). MIS provides a server environment that you can connect to in order to browse through information with Outlook Mobile Access. Outlook Mobile Access is to mobile browsers what OWA is to a Web browser. Outlook Mobile Access allows client access to your inbox, calendar, contacts, and tasks through any browser that supports Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) and Wireless Markup Language (WML).

MIS also supports notifications to mobile devices. For example, you can use MIS to send an alert to your cell phone when you receive an e-mail message or a meeting request. Beyond its basic functionality, MIS also provides an extensible platform on which you can build wireless applications. The .NET Mobile Software Developers Kit (SDK), in conjunction with MIS, provides the means to build applications that work in a regular or a mobile browser with little or no modification of your code. Visual Studio .NET 2003 incorporates all the features of the .NET Mobile SDK so you can just use Visual Studio .NET 2003 to build robust mobile applications.

With the release of Exchange 2003, MIS has mostly become part of Exchange. The only piece that is not part of Exchange is the mobile gateway technology that is part of Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server.