Lotus, Microsoft Want to Serve Your Portal

ENT, Feb 26, 2001 by Christopher Mcconnell

Peer-to-peer file sharing is often considered the province of teenage MP3 bootleggers, but Microsoft and IBM's Lotus Development division have adopted the peer-to-peer model for sharing knowledge on corporate portals.

Microsoft's forthcoming portal server, codenamed Tahoe, is in the Release Candidate 1 stage. The product will be branded as SharePoint Portal Server when it hits the market this spring.

"SharePoint Portal Server is able to search and index a variety of information services," says Trina Seinfeld, product manager for SharePoint Portal Server at Microsoft.

Microsoft says the server will ease the creation of portals, so enterprises can better relay information to workers. The company's development partners are using the server for tasks such as research sharing, legal work, and purchase order management.

To construct a portal, administrators set up templates, or "digital dashboards," embedded with Web Parts. Web Parts are HTML and XML-based objects for adding information to a site.

When SharePoint Portal was first announced it was billed as Microsoft's entry into the document management arena, but, as its name suggests, it is now marketed as a portal server. Seinfeld says its document management features should not be over-looked. "We view document management as a value add in a portal solution," she says.

SharePoint Portal is one member of the SharePoint family. SharePoint Team Services will ship with Microsoft's upcoming Office 10 release. Formerly know as Office Extensions, SharePoint Team Services offers document sharing and Web publishing for workgroups and small businesses. Notably absent from the branding announcement was mention of the .NET initiative. Seinfeld says Sharepoint Portal was architected before .NET was announced, so some technologies were not integrated into the current product. Future versions will be fully compliant with the .NET initiative.

Lotus has issued products for automating Web content since the early days of Domino, but now the company is adding the ability to mine content from client machines. While Microsoft attempts to enter the market for portal servers, Lotus is extending the functionality of its existing K-station portal server by adding search and data mining functionality.

Knowledge Discovery Server joins K-station in the Lotus Knowledge Discovery System knowledge management line. The Knowledge Discovery System is intended to help spread information internally through an enterprise.

The Lotus Knowledge Discovery Server promises the ability to leverage existing information assets by finding data stored in Lotus Notes servers and DB2 databases. Paired with the K-station, the software will allow businesses to pull information out of databases and messaging servers, and create dynamic portals.

Many documents that would remain hidden from most users are uncovered with Knowledge Discovery Server. The server crawls and indexes the content of drives mounted to the network, including drives on end user machines.

Knowledge Discovery Server is aware of Word and Excel documents, Lotus Notes databases, and Web content. With the addition of Lotus Enterprise Integration Server, the server can also access SAP and PeopleSoft information stores. Lotus plans to add Exchange integration in the future.

The server categorizes the documents it finds. Users can drill down through topics to find detailed information that had been spread throughout the enterprise. "We create a multilevel content structure," says Scott Eliot, director of knowledge management products at Lotus.

This peer-to-peer system improves the flow of information in two ways. First, all information assets are available from a single portal. Second, no central authority decides which data to put on a server. The portal server only offers links to data stored on other machines.

Although SharePoint Portal Server and Knowledge Discovery server both enable peer-to-peer document sharing, Eliot says they are very different products. "Our focus is much more on automation." Eliot believes SharePoint is primarily a work flow automation tool.

Knowledge Discovery Server was re leased in January SharePoint Portal's Release Candidate is available for download.