InformationWeek

September 25, 2000

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Microsoft's Knowledge Push

Vendor readies document-management server; exchange 2000 server to ship next month

By Aaron Ricadela

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icrosoft is beating the knowledge-management drum pretty loudly these days. Exchange 2000 Server is set to ship next month, finally providing Microsoft customers with groupware that supports Internet protocols. Office 2000, on the market for a year, makes it simpler for users to publish documents to the Web. Office 10, due next year, contains features aimed at online collaboration by teams of workers. Now, more users are poised to get a fresh look at Microsoft's upcoming document-management server, code-named Tahoe.

Microsoft plans to release the first public beta edition of Tahoe this fall--perhaps as soon as at the vendor's Exchange Collaboration and Solutions Conference in Dallas early next month. The server software, now available to a few hundred customers in an earlier, "technical" beta iteration, will complement Office by letting users build searchable libraries of documents, track which version of a file is in use, check files in and out of a central store in order to enter revisions, and create intranet portals for finding and viewing documents.

Tahoe--scheduled for release during the first half of next year--will contain its own database for documents that employs the Web storage system technology Microsoft has already included in Exchange 2000, says product manager Chris Baker. Microsoft's Web storage system houses both structured data--such as entries in a database--alongside the unstructured data found in Office documents and electronic calendar entries.

The question is how useful customers will find the technology in its first iteration, and whether they're willing to wait for it. Vendors such as Documentum Inc. and Hummingbird Ltd., already provide document-management software for Windows. Curt Meltzer, CIO of Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney LLP, has tested Tahoe, but doubts he'll use it to run a SQL Server-based document-management system the company is developing. "My guess is, it won't be as feature-rich in the first iteration as we'd like. For us to implement a Microsoft solution to store things [alongside] Exchange, it has to be rock-solid."

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