A Little Knowledge

A major piece of the strategy will be adding new capabilities to Office, Microsoft's bread-and-butter desktop application suite, company executives said.

"The mission for Office is to be everything a knowledge worker needs, not to be a spreadsheet, a word processor and a presentation package," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CRN in an interview earlier this month.

Last December, for example, Microsoft shipped SharePoint Team Services with an Office XP update. That addition some document management and routing capabilities.

"The broad way to look at it is how can Office consume Web services very easily. . . . [For example, how can SharePoint expose Web services very easily?" said Sanjay Parthasarathy, vice president of .Net Platform Strategy, referring to the Knowledge Worker initiative. Toward that end, Raikes "has Win CE and has to look at the impact of Tablet PCs. Jeff is neck deep in [the Knowledge Worker effort," he said.

Office "is one of the best businesses in the history of the world, and our whole job is to make it more and more and more valuable to people, so yes, this is a pretty big priority," Ballmer said.

Barry Goffe, group manager of Microsoft's enterprise marketing strategy group, concurred: "The question is how to reach out from the desktop and grab resources, whether they're in my organization or beyond."

Another big priority for Microsoft will be to bundle server offerings into a coherent and integrated e-business suite aimed directly at IBM's WebSphere, several sources close to the company said.

Microsoft will attempt to do just that with Jupiter, a conglomeration of Commerce Server, Content Management Server, BizTalk Server, Host Integration Server and SharePoint Portal Server, Goffe said.

"For Jupiter, we asked customers, partners and analysts about what they like and don't like, how they view the evolution of the market, [and where the current holes are," he said. The goal is to have more integration and shared technology across the applications, he added.

Currently, Microsoft offers what it calls The Microsoft Solution for Internet Business. However, solution providers say the solution lacks name recognition and support in the marketplace.

"Microsoft has all the pieces, maybe even more than WebSphere, but the packaging, messaging and integration has been left as an exercise for the developer," one solution providersaid. "A corporation can go with WebSphere and bolt on anything. Would that company go with [Microsoft Solution for Internet Business? No one's even heard of it; it's not even a SKU."