The great Office Server smorgasbord, part 1: Office SharePoint Server 2007

2005. A good year made more pleasant because we were still living under certain illusions. For one, we thought Paris Hilton headlines were in a decline. I was still 39 and therefore didn't have to worry about not being married. And Microsoft leaked that Office 2007 was going to have "a server component." Foolish technology journalists that we are, we assumed this meant 'a' server. As in one. As in single. As in my Friday night.

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But Microsoft wasn't building a lonely-heart wallflower of an Office server. They were building a swinging frat party of servers; the Alpha Beta RTM fraternity complete with hazing ritual and a kegger on release day. Five Office servers is the final tally -- almost as many servers as there are front-facing productivity apps. We were tempted to have Dean Yager simply close down this Animal House with some light-hearted comments on fixing things that aren't broken, or vast complexity designed mainly to squeeze ever more revenue out of an already starving customer base.

But then I realized it was a great excuse to go back to Hawaii.

I told Brian Chee he'd hardly know I was there, and then suckered him into doing all the hard work of setting up server hardware and managing product engineer visitors at the Advanced Network Computing Lab at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. The result, however, was too much for one review. So we're going to turn this venture into a four-part series covering all the new Office Servers in four categories, beginning with MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) because it's not only feature rich, it also acts as the central hub for the others.

We'll start by looking at MOSS on its own, enough for a solid summary of its purpose in life. In the next three articles, we'll look at the other servers in the Office Server family, examining how they work with their Office client counterparts and what advantages they gain when paired with SharePoint on the back end. We'll start with Groove and Groove Server, hit InfoPath and Forms Server, and last we'll look at Project and Visio and how they work with Project Server.

As far as SharePoint goes on its own, this article can give only a skeleton outline of what can be accomplished with this platform; a complete accounting would turn this into one of those musty tomes a librarian can't move without a handcart. For now, let's just say that calling MOSS a collaboration tool with an Office front end is the new definition of oversimplification. MOSS is at once a collaboration platform, an application development platform, a homegrown workflow engine, and a business intelligence tool. We'll cover all these points in detail in this piece and the following three.