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Microsoft Corp. this week will officially launch the newest version of its Web site software, the Content Management Server 2002.
Paul Flessner, senior vice president for .Net enterprise servers for Microsoft, will announce the launch of the server during his keynote address Tuesday at the companys MEC 2002 show in Anaheim, Calif.
Content Management Server 2002 expands the products reach beyond the simple HTML management of its predecessor, said Chris Ramsey, lead product manager for Content Management Server. Version 2001 was essentially a repackaging of the content management technology Microsoft acquired in its $36 million acquisition of NCompass Labs Inc. in May 2001, Ramsey said.
But Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., is making its mark on the technology with Content Management Server 2002, which includes built-in integration with the development tools in Microsofts Visual Studio .Net and .Net Framework, and support for XML-based Web services, Ramsey said.
“This [Version 2002] is a full Microsoft version of the product,” he said.
For business users, the key enhancement is the ability, with the new Authoring Connector technology, to directly publish Web content from Microsoft Word, eliminating the extra step of going through templates before publishing on the Web.
For developers, support for Web services—enabling users to expose content created on Content Management Server 2002 as Web services—means customers will be able to integrate their content and Web sites with applications regardless of the platform or development languages being used, according to Ramsey.
Being able to manage standards-based XML content—and being able to expose that content as Web services—offers the interoperability that many enterprises crave, he said.
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“They live in a heterogeneous world,” complete with Web-enabled front-end systems, mainframes and legacy technology, Ramsey said. “Their message was loud and clear: we need the stuff we have to integrate easily with my other stuff.”
Integration with Visual Studio .Net and the .Net Framework will offer developers prebuilt content management server controls and full source code management not only from Microsoft but also from such companies as Merant plc. and Rational Software Corp., he said.
The content management server controls drag-and-drop capabilities enable developers to more quickly assemble Web sites. Ramsey said that lab tests showed that with the controls, developers needed 80 percent fewer lines of code to create Web sites and their content.
He said Content Management Server 2001 enabled Microsoft to grow this part of the business over the past year, with customers growing from 200 when NCompass was bought to about 700 now. Also, at the time of the acquisition, larger enterprises accounted for less than 5 percent of those customers. Now that number is more than 50 percent, Ramsey said.
Content Management Server 2002 should be generally available by the end of the year, Ramsey said,with pricing starting at about $42,000 per CPU.