OIL & GAS

REDMOND, Wash. -- Microsoft Corp. today announced that partner momentum is rapidly growing for the Microsoft(R) Office System, with solution partners building and deploying SharePoint(TM) Products and Technologies solutions powered by Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows(R) SharePoint Services, which offer enterprise-ready collaboration, communication and presence -- all on the extensible Microsoft .NET Framework. The partner support for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies represents the growing excitement and support around what analysts reports indicate could be a $117 billion (U.S.) partner services opportunity by 2006 for business intelligence, collaboration, work management and business process solutions. Thus far, more than 100 new solutions for SharePoint Products and Technologies have been developed by more than 50 partners showcasing a breadth of industries and domain expertise, thereby offering Microsoft customers innovative new ways to realize business value by increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of their information workers. "We're excited to work with Microsoft Office System partners that can complement Microsoft SharePoint technology with their domain expertise to solve customer problems," said Kurt DelBene, corporate vice president of Office Server Group at Microsoft. "These partners are taking advantage of the opportunities within SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services to develop products and services that are attuned to their customers' productivity and collaboration needs." SharePoint Products and Technologies Partners Extend Benefits of Portal Collaboration Into New Domains CorasWorks provides an easily deployable predefined portal workplace solution that extends SharePoint Products and Technologies for specific business scenarios. CorasWorks Workplace Suite allows companies to quickly create online business systems that are easily customizable, without having to spend the time and resources to develop an infrastructure. "Within a matter of hours, an organization has been able to begin collaborating on SharePoint Products and Technologies," said William Rogers, president of CorasWorks. "Within days, their workplace is in full use with over 200 users between the company, vendors and government agencies. SharePoint Products and Technologies with CorasWorks allows companies to build and deploy collaborative solutions quickly and effectively, thus decreasing the learning curve and accelerating adoption." Another partner, firstRain Inc., extends the Web Part infrastructure. The firstRain software platform provides portal users with unparalleled access to fresh, relevant content from a wide variety of sources such as partner or vendor Web sites, while reducing the cost and difficulty of accessing data from both inside and outside the corporate firewall. "Our Web Part Composer for Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 enables enterprises to create robust Web Parts from Web-based content and applications, with no programming required," said Don Henrich, vice president of Worldwide Sales, Services and Marketing for firstRain. "This allows for rapid development and deployment of customized Web Parts, and easy 'right-click' publishing of these Web Parts to SharePoint Portal Server. The result is reduced costs and effective reuse of existing content and technology investments." Extending into the Microsoft Office System as a smart client, Juice Software Inc. enables the collaborative experience between SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Excel 2003 through the Juice Platform, which is built on standards such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web services. The unique advantage of the Juice Platform is its ability to work seamlessly as an extension of native Excel that fully embraces the power and flexibility of Excel 2003 without inhibiting Excel 2003's functionality in any way. "Juice Software enables enterprises to fully leverage and unleash the potential of Microsoft Excel and other Office applications, by providing real-time and rapid information integration and sharing between Excel and SharePoint Products and Technologies, as well as other data sources across the enterprise and the Web," said Yong Su Kim, vice president of Business Development at Juice Software. Through the .NET Framework, which is the development platform for SharePoint Products and Technologies, several partners with infrastructure capabilities are able to create solutions. They include MediaRich by Equilibrium Technologies Inc., a Digital Asset Management solution; Hyper.Net by Coextant Systems International, an XML Web-service-based document publishing solution; McAfee PortalShield by Network Associates Technology Inc., a comprehensive, proactive virus protection and content security solution; DocAve by AvePoint Inc., a document-level backup and migration solution; RtPM by OSIsoft, a real-time performance management solution for the manufacturing market; iScala by Scala Business Solutions NV, a next-generation collaborative enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution; and iOra for SharePoint, by iOra, an offline networking solution. SharePoint Products and Technologies Move Under Microsoft Office System Umbrella The public availability of the new SharePoint Products and Technologies will coincide with the launch of the Microsoft Office System Oct. 21 in New York. Until now, the Microsoft Office family has consisted primarily of products and servers that facilitated asynchronous communication and collaboration. Microsoft has moved individual productivity tools to the team level with the new Microsoft Office System. This team focus will enable information workers to meet online, share information and collaborate on documents in real time, promoting better productivity. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is the scalable portal server that connects people, teams and knowledge across business processes to facilitate better collaboration. Designed as an enterprise business solution, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 integrates information from various systems into one solution through single sign-on and enterprise application integration capabilities, and provides flexible deployment and management tools. Windows SharePoint Services is the engine for creating Web sites that enable information-sharing and document collaboration, and for increasing individual and team productivity. This technology provides team services and sites to Microsoft Office and other desktop applications, as well as serving as a platform for application development. Microsoft Office FrontPage(R) 2003, the Web site creation and management tool, provides partners with more power to design highly customized SharePoint sites, and build rich, dynamic SharePoint solutions, including data-driven and Web parts solutions. Using FrontPage 2003, partners can build integrated solutions in a fraction of the time it would take to build a similar solution using server-side programming and hand coding. Together, Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies are designed to enable easy, connected collaboration across an organization. Using the combined collaboration features of Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2003, organizations can empower users to create and manage rich, easy-to-build SharePoint sites, and allow those sites to be discovered throughout the organization.