CorasWorks Bets Big On SharePoint App Building

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.

The company, 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 maintenance, the Rollup Wizard will cost an additional $5,000. At the same time this spring, the company will also unveil a new Workplace for Outlook that will enable users to run Outlook functions from within SharePoint itself and replicate tasks from a cross 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] task bar," said Dan Kruger, CEO of Ability Engineering, an Evergreen, Colo.-based consultant specializing in collaborative applications.

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 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. (For more on this product see related story.

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

Whether customers want to run CorasWorks atop Windows Server 2003 alone or that plus SharePoint Portal Server 2003 depends on what they want to do.

SharePoint Portal Server, a superset of the Windows SharePoint Services, gives them single sign-on, global search across sites and tight integration with Exchange Server, said Kruger. The latter perk means "you can drop e-mail folders into [SharePoint] libraries. You can't do that with Windows SharePoint Services," he noted.

This is not Rogers' first go-round with Microsoft and collaboration. He used to work with Snapware, a maker of modular workgroup software for use on the Microsoft platform. But in the mid-1990s, Microsoft was not a real player in this market, despite an ill-fated attempt to make Exchange Server the engine powering third-party collaborative applications. Exchange Server has since evolved into a messaging platform. Rogers insists that with the latest SharePoint portal and foundation technologies, Microsoft now offers a viable development platform for collaboration.