SharePoint Gets Boost From CorasWorks

The company's CorasWorks Workplace Suite rides atop either SharePoint Portal Server 2003 or the Windows SharePoint Services embedded in Windows Server 2003, allowing integrators to roll up multiple workspaces to view and manage them more efficiently, said William Rogers, CEO of the McLean, Va.-based company.

CorasWorks, which updates its suite quarterly, next plans to add a Roll-Up Wizard that will include what one partner characterized as a "Web part for creating Web parts." In the Microsoft lexicon, Web parts are reusable bits of code for various tasks that plug into SharePoint workspaces.

While the base-level Workplace suite costs $8,000 per server plus 20 percent for maintenance, the Roll-Up Wizard will cost an additional $5,000. At the same time this spring, the company plans to unveil a new Workplace for Outlook that will enable users to run Outlook functions from within SharePoint and replicate tasks from across SharePoint into Outlook's client. That will cost $3,000 per server.

Several solution providers cited the existing CorasWorks' ability to consolidate tasks from myriad SharePoint workplaces as a key selling point.

"If I'm a middle manager and have sales-related tasks and accounting-related tasks in a half-dozen offices, CorasWorks lets me roll up all my assigned tasks in all of those spaces and display them in my [single] taskbar," said Dan Kruger, CEO of Ability Engineering, Evergreen, Colo. Without CorasWorks, that user would have to toggle between all those SharePoint spaces to see what he or she needs to be doing for each.

Bob Shear, president of Greystone Solutions, Woburn, Mass., said CorasWorks converts SharePoint from a platform into a solution. And, the beauty of it for solution providers is that it provides a natural upsell opportunity into existing SharePoint Portal Server and Windows Server 2003 customers. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 was part of the massive Office System 2003 rollout last fall.

While many ISVs look at total reliance on an ever-growing Microsoft stack with anxiety, Rogers maintains that his company can stay ahead of the feature-and-function curve with Microsoft. "The next major SharePoint and Windows version is not until 2006. By that time we'll have other features," he said.