Microsoft CMS Finds New Home With SharePoint

The CMS team is being folded into the SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) group, Microsoft sources confirmed Monday.

"It just makes sense. This is based on customer feedback [and] analyst feedback. The two [products] are closely aligned, so it makes sense to align them organizationally," one Microsoft source said.

Last week, Microsoft announced the availability of integration software, code-named Spark to link the current releases of the portal server (and Windows SharePoint Services) and CMS.

With this shift, "the Spark CMS/SPS work becomes more interesting in some ways. This is really a precursor to a much deeper consolidation of the products," said one source close to the situation. Indeed, some at Microsoft and outside speculate that over time, CMS might see its functionality merged over time into the portal.

This change takes a product that had been in the server group, along with Commerce Server, BizTalk Server and the nascent Jupiter server, that will combine most of those capabilities under the auspices of Paul Flessner, senior vice president of the Server Platform Division. It will now be in the business productivity group that is home to mostly client-side offerings such as Office. SharePoint Portal Server was the exception to that rule.

What that might mean to the full Jupiter suite, due out in 2005, is unclear. The second phase of Jupiter, code-named Discovery, was to meld commerce server, content management server and integration server capabilities into one pay-as-you-go offering.

Microsoft could not be reached for comment on this story on Monday. Last week, a senior product manager in Microsoft's E-business server group would not comment on organizational matters.