The Future of Microsoft Content Management Server (CMS) and SharePoint Portal Server (SPS)

At IT Forum, I presented CMS and SPS futures. That's right, CMS futures. :-) Session feedback was very positive... The only place I got dinged was for attempting to cover too much: SPS, Search and CMS in 75 minutes to be precise. I did about 30 minutes of demo ... my demo stalled (beta code)... nothing like doing an iisreset in front of 260 people. :-) It's beta code after all.

In a nutshell, and I will write more later, the next wave of web content management (WCM) functionality is built on top of Windows SharePoint Services "v3". I've already blogged about this earlier. It will come out in the Office "12" timeframe with a public beta Spring of 2006. While packaging and licensing is still to be announced, the functionality, integration and architecture has been disclosed. PDC was the beginning and at IT Forum we revealed even more. It's super cool to have one platform for collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management (ecm), bi, forms resulting in one development, deployment and end-user story.

Enhancements in WCM functionality in Office "12" include (just to name a few):
- Richer Web Authoring
- better site deployment tools
- Flexible Rich Client Authoring
- Integrated Search
- Template Authoring in FrontPage
- Workflow templates
- Web Part architecture and support for Master Pages
- Complete API :-) (specifically targetted to folks wanting to access security groups today)
- Web based site management tools
- Multi-lingual publishing capabilities

Needless to say, b/c this is built on top of WSS "v3", you get all the goodness like RSS, single item security, content types, et cetera. Will write more later and include some slides from my session... I might do a web cast as well in the near future.