Title: Platform adds Feature Range, From Must-Use to Overdue
Author:Doug Henschen
Publication: InformationWeek
Issue: 1266
Date Published: May 10, 2010
Summary:
Since its first release in 2001, SharePoint has followed the typical Microsoft path from mediocrity to market dominance. What started as a poor man's portal is now a highly scalable platform that starts with robust collaboration and content management and extends Microsoft's reach into business intelligence and custom application development. For CIOs wrestling with how to provide Facebook for the enterprise kinds of profiles and collaboration, SharePoint 2010 adds social networking functionality in the Communities area. SharePoint 2010's Content functionality continues a years-long march toward true enterprise content management scale, with single repositories now maxing out at 50 million items. There are new Search capabilities as well. A new interface, with content- and concept-driven navigation, is nice, but other upgrades are obvious, overdue, or, confusingly, not a part of SharePoint. Despite the sizzle of some of these features, one of the biggest changes in SharePoint 2010 is in IT management and development controls, which go unseen by end users.

Title: Microsoft Looks to Unlock Door to Wider BI Use
Author: Eric Lai
Publication: Computerworld
Vol. 42, Iss. 41
Date Published: Oct 13, 2008
Summary:
SQL server may be one of the most popular databases among corporate users, but Microsoft Corp is a relative laggard in the business intelligence (BI) market. But Microsoft last week detailed a multipronged strategy aimed at scaling up the size of the data warehouses that SQL Server can support into the hundreds of terabytes while also democratizing BI within companies through the use of Excel and other Office applications. Now, via a self-service analysis project code-named Gemini, Microsoft plans to develop "an Excel-based user analytics mashup tool" designed to make it easier for end users to build their own BI applications, Forrester Research Inc analyst James Kobielus said in an e-mail.