By J. Nicholas Hoover
 Deployments of Microsoft’s SharePoint software can get complicated, since the hot-selling software offers so many functions: content management, portal, enterprise search, collaboration suite. But Microsoft VP Jeff Teper, who’s led SharePoint’s development since its inception in 1998, says the mission is simple: “To have one place to go to organize, share, and access information wherever it lived.”
Microsoft’s entrant into Enterprise 2.0 brings in $1 billion in revenue a year, with more than 100 million seat licenses sold. SharePoint’s success comes in part from doing many collaboration and content functions moderately well. But when the project began, one main strategy was creating a product that would make building Web sites more intuitive. SharePoint still has site templates, along with integration with Office’s productivity apps.
Teper’s challenge now is to keep SharePoint relevant amid trends such as software as a service and to add advanced capabilities such as business intelligence. He also has rivals such as IBM and EMC now gunning for SharePoint. “I kind of like that thing about only the paranoid survive,” Teper says. He wants to make it easier for customers to move SharePoint deployments to the cloud and is deepening an integration partnership with SAP.
This year, Microsoft will unveil the next version of SharePoint, likely with more social networking features. “We’re much closer to the beginning than the end of SharePoint,” he says. It’s hard to bet against him.
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