This is part four and the last installment of my notes from a local event sponsored by Knowledge Management Associates, “Real World Sharepoint Experiences.” Tara Seppa is a Microsoft Information Worker Solution Specialist who works with small to midsize businesses in New England. She covered Microsoft’s Sharepoint Investment areas. Tara started by saying that the latest launch wave – Windows server 2008 will include virtualization. There will also be SQL2008 enhancements to better work with Sharepoint including compression and high availability.

The Microsoft Search Server 2008 will be better suited for intranet searching with new federation capabilities and no preset document limits. It will be available in two versions including a free express version for a single server. Search will use mashups to include content form multiple sources in one result set. Currently, there is federation – search from other sources now. The next move will be to a combined mashuped set of results. Sharepoint will also allow for tagging and rating of content while maintaining the taxonomy.

The next release of Sharepoint, Microsoft will be investing for the paradigm shift to more web 2.0 capabilities. The consumer web is influencing the enterprise and search is getting bigger. Microsoft feels that software + services is the best of both worlds – combine SaaS and desktop apps. There are limits of Sharepoint online that can be handled by desktop apps. Social networking and social software are on the rise and success here is about building trust. Social networking is an important first step for collaboration and finding documents. Currently, knowledge is modern organizations isn’t just 80 undocumented, it is 95% invisible. The Sharepoint social networking capability, Knowledge Network, was not implemented in last version of Sharepoint but they are planning to implement it in next version.

Other new investments include making lists more relational and they will be the backbone of Sharepoint. Social networking will get more emphasis as mentioned above. Microsoft made a big investment in Facebook. The Sharepoint My Site profile will be seen as the hub of network. Knowledge Network integration is likely to happen as mentioned above. It indexes what’s on your system to determine your expertise (but you can turn it on and off). So the Knowledge Network will cover more than just what you put on your profile to My Site. It will look at how you are really working.

Finally she said they want to get beyond sequential collaboration. Influences from both the Groove acquisition and wikis will help them get past the limits of check in and out.

I asked about the announced commitment to integration with best of breed players who now offer some of the new directions she described for Sharepoint. Tara said Microsoft will continue its integration with best of breed players, especially in vertical market applications. Sharepoint is more of a platform and will not try to bring in all features into the product.

She closed with the announcement that Office 14 will be out soon and a new release of Sharepoint will come out at this time as well. Office 2007 separated language from function. It works so well they will be doing it from Sharepoint in next release. There is a Sharepoint blog to follow the latest moves.