Last week I blogged on “Microsoft’s Worse Kept Secret”: the merging of Sharepoint and Content Management Server (CMS) into a single group offer.

Well, Microsoft reminded me about the importance of perspective and point of view.

John Amyotte, a solutions specialist from Microsoft Canada’s portal group, offers the MS perspective on merging products into a single group. “Merging” and “group” yes,” says Amyotte, a 5-year veteran of the content management industry. “But they are still two separate products. The goal is for it to be transparent like Sharepoint portal and Windows Sharepoint services. And this is what a suite should be….one UI.”

Amyotte stresses that CMS is not disappearing. “Just to confirm CMS is not being phased out. In fact, the next release has more R&D funding going into it then the entire history of the product.

To be precise, hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested into the new Sharepoint and CMS bundling project with the offer due next Christmas (2006). 

“One of the challenges in the ECM and portal space is that if you want to create web content, manage a document, and collaborate with peers via email and instant messaging you end up toggling between numerous solutions that do not talk well to each other.”

To overcome the multi-client challenge Microsoft envisions a more user-friendly environment that allows the user to accomplish more without having to use multiple products or interfaces.

“Multiple user interfaces (UI's) across a large organization creates a user adoption challenge. Some vendors have tried to solve this challenge by acquiring other companies, but the reality is the products are written in various languages and never truly integrate. You still end up with multiple solutions and UI's that don't integrate.”

This of course is nothing new as others like Plumtree and Vignette already have integrated portal-content management-search products. However, Microsoft is not known for subscribing to the first-mover model (think of the browser, instant messaging, and content management and portal products to name a few).

But why settle at simply integrating two or three products? “The intent of the next release is to have a transparent integration between CMS, Sharepoint, and Office,” reveals Amyotte.   

“Users create content with the tools they use everyday such as Word or Outlook and the content can easily be used to create a web page on the external site, a document repository for collaboration, a confidential document on the global extranet, or a personalized announcement for the intranet also distributed via handheld devices.” 

Big things cooking in Redmond. But we’ll have to wait another 16 or 17-months before we can taste...