Microsoft reveals its softer side

I took out extra life insurance and amended my will to make sure the Ducati was cremated with me at my memorial service. Then I said goodbye to family and friends and hopped a Continental sardine can bound for Seattle to venture into the belly of the beast: the Microsoft campus. There's a certain calm that comes over you when faced with the certainty of your own demise, a death mellow if you will.

But surprisingly, I didn't wind up floating facedown in a dumpster behind the Homestead Residence Inn, starring in my own episode of CSI: Seattle. Instead, they sat me down in an only slightly isolated conference room and started walking product managers through it. It was a bit of a let down in a way; I was expecting ninja assassins at the minimum. Microsoft really harshed my mellow with this kinder, gentler thing, but it worked.

I gripe about bad coding practices and a revolving cycle of security issues that looks as unsolvable as my credit report. I also complain about sick licensing schemes and cost models that simply don't account for the small and midsize among us. And most of all, I grumble about a Northwest behemoth that simply doesn't listen.

Well, many of those problems still remain, but Microsoft is definitely starting to listen. I can't write about much of what was imparted to me in my muffin-laced conference sessions because it's still under NDA (nondisclosure agreement), but I can say that the next few years will show a Microsoft vision of corporate computing that will give other platforms a run for their money -- if Redmond can deliver. (Me, skeptical? You know better than that.) I'll be devoting the next couple of columns to the stuff I can talk about from my Redmond visit, and we'll get to the secret stuff as soon as the lawyers unclench their claw-like grip from around my windpipe.

I learned quite a bit during my two days in Redmond. Not the least of which is that if you're making headway with a beautiful Seattle native at a bar, don't bring up Seattle's high suicide rate or you'll wind up alone carrying the nasty moniker of "poopypants." But if you are thus abandoned, you might as well head back to the office and hop on over to the Microsoft site. Because there you can now download SharePoint Services  for Windows 2003 Server, for free.

Yeah, that's right. SharePoint Portal  still costs the extra bucks. But for a fast and unbelievably flexible intranet-in-a-can, you can drop SharePoint Services on any local Windows 2003 Server, and you're good to go. Only two caveats: First, you've got to be running IIS, which would be expected and isn't that big a ding as long as everything's behind the firewall anyway; next, you can't use Kerberos authentication as SharePoint defaults to NTLM (NT LAN Manager) out of the box, although you can get back to Kerberos if you work a bit harder and digest some Microsoft knowledge papers.