The PC-based software industry today is about 30 years old. But if you look carefully at all the products that have been released, you will soon find that most of them are different variations of a basic theme. For example, consider the most popular word processor today, MS Word. It still basically does the same thing WordStar did in 1978-that is, it allows you to write text documents. Or think about MS Excel, which is just a fancy version of VisiCalc, released in 1978. Not much is really new in the software industry.

The focus today is more on making all this sophisticated software interact with each other.

What SharePoint does is help you gather this information together, regardless of what type of file or information it is. SharePoint also helps you find information, even when you don't know where it is stored, and SharePoint helps you keep track of updated information. In other words, SharePoint does no invent any new information type; instead, it helps you get the right information when you need it without spending lots of time. Even more importantly, all this information is easily shared between users, such as project teams, departments, or even large organizations.

Here is a short list of things you can do in the SharePoint 2003:

• Create an Intranet that targets news and information to specific groups
• Build Local Intranets for departments
• Search for documents, files, e-mail, and news regardless of where they are stored
• Create a personal web site for each user that displays targeted information
• Create web sites for managing projects, customers, and activities
• Extend the functionality in MS Office with document management
• Create web sites with MS Outlook to keep track of your meetings
• Create alerts that will notify you by e-mail when something is changed