As of Office 2003, Microsoft is lumping its SharePoint technologies - both its SharePoint Portal Server and its recently renamed Windows SharePoint Services - in with the rest of its Office "System" products.

SharePoint Portal Server is Microsoft's combined portal, document-management and search server. SPS is at the crux of Microsoft's evolving information-worker/business-intelligence strategies. Forthcoming versions of SPS will be tied tightly to Office 2003, Windows .Net Server 2003 and Microsoft's next-generation "Jupiter" e-business bundle.

By the end of last year, Microsoft claimed it had sold 10 million seats of SharePoint Portal Server since introducing version one of the product in May 2001.

"SharePoint Portal Server 2.0," as the upcoming version of Redmond's portal server is code-named, gets a facelift, as of Beta 2 of the full Office suite. Microsoft began shipping Office System 2003 Beta 2 to testers on Monday.

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