Microsoft News Tracker

Bink.nu points to the low key announcement that Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 was released today for web download by users of Windows Server 2003. The key improvements:

Improvements to collaboration workspaces: SharePoint sites now offer e-mail and directory integration, alerts, RSS publishing, templates for building blogs (also known as weblogs) and wikis (Web sites that can be quickly edited by team members—no special technical knowledge required), event and task tracking, improved usability, enhanced site navigation, and more.

Enhancements to content storage: SharePoint lists and libraries now provide per-item security for better data control and integrity, a recycle bin, and enhanced flexibility for storing more types of content. Row and column capacity has also been increased, as has retrieval speed. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 can be easily integrated with smart client tools. In particular, close integration with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 provides offline access to events, contacts, discussions, tasks, and documents.

Easier provisioning of workspaces: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides more sophisticated and flexible security, as well as greater control over security settings and permissions.

A more robust foundation for Web applications: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides greater flexibility for customization and development of Web-based services and applications built on the Windows SharePoint Services platform.

In case the multiple Microsoft uses of the name SharePoint are confusing, here’s a slightly improved version of an explanation I have given previously:

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is the free Microsoft add-on workgroup collaboration product for a Windows server operating system. It has a non-free enterprise cousin called Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (to be replaced by Office SharePoint Server 2007) that ties all the workgroups together and adds a variety of enterprise level features.

And speaking of SharePoint Server 2007, it was released to manufacturing last week and not unexpectedly features integration with Office 2007.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Robert A. Guth provides a glowing profile of Joanne Bradford who was appointed as Microsoft’s Web ad czar in January and offers this teaser:

In the latest signal that Microsoft has gotten the online-ad religion, a company official said yesterday that Ms. Bradford, 43 years old, will soon be named to head its MSN online group, which runs a Web site delivering news, video and services such as email and instant messaging.

MSN has lacked an executive since David Cole took a leave of absence in February although technically he was replaced in April by former Ask.com CEO Steve Berkowitz who runs the Online Business Group created in March which includes MSN.

The thrust of Guth’s article is that Bradford has struggled to represent the old style of advertising sales (complete with glad handing salesman) in the techie world of Microsoft and that she might just be what MSN needs to get ad sales going. One hopes so since what Bradford has done so far as ad czar is mostly renaming Microsoft’s ad sales program and unsurprisingly, that hasn’t done much for the bottom line. Coincidentally, Henry Blodget just got through spanking Microsoft ad sales and observes:

It’s ancient history by now–and certainly not news–but it’s worth noting that Microsoft still hasn’t made any headway in the search-and-portal game and, in fact, is falling farther and farther behind.
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How badly is MSN/Windows Live doing these days?  In Q3, advertising revenue rose only 5%, once again the slowest rate of growth of the big four (even lagging Yahoo’s pathetic quarter). Display advertising on portals, email, etc., was up, but search revenue was down again, despite AdCenter having been rolled out to the entire U.S. market.

Having salesman wining and dining the automakers and other big advertisers is swell if you want big splashy banners for your somnolent portal business or you want to sell full page ads in Business Week (Bradford’s previous gig), but that’s unfortunately a couple generations of the Web out of date.

Update: What would a good old fashioned advertising story be without an Ad Age rendition? Some more details:

Chris Dobson will expand his international sales responsibilities to take over Ms. Bradford’s former post, running global sales, and Bill Shaughnessy will run the Microsoft Digital Ad Solution Business Group with responsibility for product management and planning for the adCenter and ad-serving projects.

It’ll be interesting to see if they can do any better.

Update: A primer for the Bradford philosophy - Microsoft to Google: WE love ad sales people.

Press release:

Microsoft Corp. and Sprint Corp. today announced a strategic alliance through which the companies will develop and deliver a range of innovative new service offerings for Sprint’s business and consumer customers. The first consumer offering in this collaboration enables Sprint customers to use Windows Live™ Search for mobile on their wireless phones to conveniently search location-based content from the Internet, such as nearby stores and restaurants, as well as Sprint’s catalog of ring tones, games, screen savers and related services. The service also provides new opportunities for highly relevant and targeted local advertising, which will benefit businesses and consumers alike.

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The service is immediately available at no additional cost to Sprint PCS Vision^SM and Sprint Power Vision^SM subscribers on all currently available data-capable phones, along with many popular older models.*

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Windows Live Search for mobile combines Microsoft^® Windows Live Local Search features, such as maps and directions, with capabilities allowing the indexing and discovery of highly relevant mobile content. This approach brings simplicity for users by delivering search results grouped in useful categories and in a format appropriate for a user’s specific mobile device.

The location-based offering available today from Sprint and Microsoft requires users to input their location by entering their ZIP code, address, or city and state. Future versions of the service are planned to enable consumers to give permission to automatically locate them and show the nearest businesses that match their search.

The press release is a little coy about the monetary aspects, but Daisuke Wakabayashi reports for Reuters that:

Sprint and Microsoft will share the revenue from advertisements placed alongside Windows Live search results and the two companies will work together to introduce new mobile phones services in the future.

It’s fundamentally another eyeball auction only instead of a content site like MySpace, a PC manufacturer like Dell, or an Internet service provider like Verizon, it’s a mobile phone service provider. Microsoft presumably has a leg up on the competition in that arena with the providers like Sprint who are already using Windows Mobile to power their phones.

Microsoft’s Ken Moss at Live Search’s Weblog:

Today, we are excited to announce that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are coming together in support of the Sitemaps protocol. The goal of this effort is to improve search results for customers around the world. This protocol enables site owners everywhere to tell search engines about the content on their site instead of having to rely solely on crawl algorithms to find it.

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Interested in the gritty details? Read more about the Sitemaps protocol at the official website: http://www.sitemaps.org.  If you have any comments, please let us know by leaving a comment.

This may seem fairly arcane to many readers, but the basic idea is to create an XML website map to “help” search engine crawlers find the content. In the old days of sites with static Web pages this wasn’t necessary, but today’s dynamically generated websites (like this weblog) make the crawlers’ job much more difficult. As a result, Google developed the Sitemaps protocol for webmasters to use and Microsoft and Yahoo have now signed on to support it. The protocol is available under a Creative Commons license. Danny Sullivan has more details and the history here.