Gates outlines SharePoint strategy, hammers IBM

"We are committed to the next 15 years of Notes innovation with announcements around expanding the capability of Notes to an open platform with embedded productivity tools and complete support for all exiting Notes applications," said Ed Brill, business unit executive for worldwide sales at IBM/Lotus.

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Clearly, Gates is pushing the battle with IBM/Lotus to another frontier.

Gates then moved onto a question about unifying storage and workflow capabilities in the Windows platform. He admitted that Microsoft's current storage model could be better.

"In terms of programming and backing things up it would be better if we could get things into a single structure. Down the road Exchange will be built entirely on SQL Server," he said.

In fact, he said getting SharePoint and Microsoft's meta-directory technology to be more native SQL Server is a hot topic within the company. "In the next major release [of SQL Server] we will take some significant steps in that direction."

Gates said workflow would be a tougher problem to solve and said Microsoft needed to support different models.

"In workflow ... we are going to let there be a little bit of variety as the state of the art develops," he said. "It is not really just workflow, it is declarative programming, model-based declarative programming, which we are investing in very heavily. But I am not pushing all the people to have one [workflow] engine yet. I think we have to go a whole generation allowing those things to get richer."

On the topic of SharePoint, Gates said the emergence of a central collaboration hub built around SharePoint is now possible due to many advances in the industry. He pointed out storage, computer performance, unified infrastructure, data analysis, and the explosion of available end-user devices, including a plug for his favorite Tablet PC that has failed to reach critical mass.

Gates drew an analogy between what Office 2007 is doing with SharePoint on the server with what Office has meant to the client as a way to explain how deeply SharePoint will become ingrained in corporate computing.

"The idea [Office running on the client] was that every worker should have the full set of tools, they should be richly consistent and you should just take them for granted," he said.

Gate said SharePoint would be the place to bring together both structured and unstructured data that could be fused into templates adapted to meet a specific business practice.

SharePoint is designed to be the foundation not only for sharing any document type produced by the Office desktop applications, but also the switching station for workflow, document routing/approval, instant messaging/presence information, business intelligence, search and electronic forms.

Microsoft also is killing Content Management Server and folding its capabilities into SharePoint, which will be pitched to corporate users as a multitask, identity-enabled engine to host collaborative sites not just for the intranet but for the extranet and Internet as well. Microsoft also plans an option to license the server per CPU so users can host Web sites on the platform.

In addition, Office 2007 plugs two glaring SharePoint holes by adding offline client capabilities through Office Groove and Outlook, and a rapid application development tool called SharePoint Designer. The server also is integrated with Visual Studio 2005 and the .Net 2.0 Framework so developers can build, and easily debug, components that Designer will use to stitch together SharePoint applications.

The SharePoint Conference runs through Thursday.