Well the cat is finally out of Gates’ richly tailored bag. Microsoft is now publicly hinting what so many knew to be true about a year ago (or more): MS is merging Sharepoint and Content Management Server (CMS) into a single group offer.

Bruce Dunwoodie was one of the first to report this on CMSWire. “In one of the first public statements on the topic, Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s group vice president of Information Worker Product Group, indicated that the future of the two products was around more common technologies and an integration, if not outright convergence,” writes the intrepid Dunwoodie.

“We do think of SharePoint and CMS very much together. CMS is running Internet sites, SharePoint for intranet sites and team collaboration,” says Capossela.

Of course this is not a formal admission which MS is shy to do. However, as I blogged back on April 10 (see Microsoft’s Intranet Portal Innovates), Gates & company are investing hundreds of millions of dollars and a dedicated team of some 300 people to beefing-up Sharepoint and fully integrating a new and improved content management system (Content Management Server as it is known today).

This is serious, serious business for MS. Gates et al are not intent to play second fiddle to Plumtree and IBM in the enterprise intranet portal market (if you call 31 million users a ‘second fiddle’) and understand that linking MS-Office and content management with a portal product and .NET could be a market clincher for them.... if they execute accordingly.

This new Sharepoint offering however will not be ready until December 2006 (planned date) which gives the competition a little lead time to up the ante.