What makes Microsoft's SharePoint tick?
For being the fastest growing server product at Microsoft, SharePoint is still largely misunderstood. There’s no question its one of Microsoft’s most important enterprise products, contributing more than $1 billion to the company’s coffers. Yet, as CEO Steve Ballmer himself acknowledged this week, SharePoint an “unsung hero.”
In part, SharePoint is unsung because it’s a complex and ambitious product. It’s not just a content management system or an enterprise social-networking product, or an intranet search system. It’s six different servers bundled into a single back-end for Microsoft Office. There are thousands of Microsoft employees working on 40 different teams contributing to the product. It has provided system integrators, consultants and other partners with a lot of business because it has been tricky to deploy, maintain and customize.
