While Microsoft watchers continue to obsess over Microsoft's plans to take on Google, few are paying attention to a family of products that could emerge as one of the main revenue generators for the company over the next few years.

The SharePoint collaboration/workgroup software family could be one of Microsoft's sleeper hits in the not-too-distant future – at least based on how hard the company is pushing them to customers.

This week, Microsoft will play host to 1,300 SharePoint customers and partners at its the SharePoint 2006 Conference in Bellevue, Wash., where Chairman Bill Gates and other key Microsoft executives are set to extol the virtues of SharePoint to the capacity crowd.

Microsoft's SharePoint products include both its SharePoint Server 2007 successor to SharePoint Portal Server 2003, as well as its Windows SharePoint Services Version 3 technologies.

Microsoft has sold more than 75 million SharePoint Portal Server 2003 licenses to date. More than 180 Microsoft partners are building SharePoint solutions. And just about every Windows customer is using Windows SharePoint Services, according to Microsoft officials.

SharePoint could be the product about which Microsoft Business Division President Jeff Raikes was thinking when he predicted the week of May 15 that Microsoft could double its information-worker revenues from 2002 levels to reach $20 billion by 2010. (To meet that goal, Microsoft would have to add $8.4 billion in sales over four years.)

Rather than the Office desktop-productivity suite, "the server products are what Raikes is counting on for that $20 billion," said Rob Helm, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, based in Kirkland, Wash. In addition to SharePoint, Raikes also is likely banking on Exchange Server sales, as well as sales of Microsoft Project, which, as Helm noted, "is now Microsoft's sixth-largest business (after Windows, Office, Windows Server, SQL Server, and Exchange) and is also in Raikes' organization."

Of the server products in the Information Worker Unit, however, "SharePoint is definitely the one best set for growth," said Helm. "Office 2007 is full of hooks to SharePoint, SharePoint Server 2007 has a lot of critical new capabilities (such as workflow), and a lot of companies have already paid for the standard edition of SharePoint when they licensed Windows Server and Exchange on their Enterprise Agreements, so the incremental cost of trying the product out is small."

Microsoft's hope is that it will be able to convince its Office desktop users that their lives will be vastly improved if they also run SharePoint Server on the back end. Microsoft is designing its next-gen Office suite so that all the Office 2007 desktop apps make use of SharePoint Server 2007. For example, users of Word 2007 and Excel 2007 will be able to kick off business-intelligence and content-management functions directly from inside the desktop applications.

SharePoint Server 2007 includes an integrated set of technologies that span collaboration; business intelligence (via Excel Server functionality); portal; business-process; enterprise-content-management (via Microsoft's Content Management Server technology) and search.

A growing number of product teams inside Microsoft also are finding ways to integrate, if not outright package, their wares with SharePoint Server, as well.

"Any organization at Microsoft that is thinking about using some kind of portal almost always has SharePoint inside," Kurt DelBene, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Office Server Group, told Microsoft Watch.

Microsoft also is seeking to position SharePoint as a development platform, the same way it has pushed to make Office and Windows Live platforms on the level of Windows and .Net. The company is putting the finishing touches on SharePoint Designer, a new development tool built by the FrontPage team, that is tailored to building SharePoint sites. (SharePoint Designer is the complement to Expression Web Designer, code-named "Quartz," a tool aimed more at designers than developers. Microsoft released to testers on May 15 a first Community Technology Preview test build of Expression Web Designer.)

"If you are building a line-of-business application, it's natural to think of that as a SharePoint site as well," DelBene said, "especially if you are talking about ERP, CRM and business-process-oriented" kinds of solutions.

At this week's SharePoint Conference, Gates, DelBene and other Microsoft brass are on tap to talk up some new SharePoint technologies and capabilities that Microsoft is developing. Microsoft will highlight tools and techniques for securing and managing SharePoint at the conference. They also will highlight the links between SharePoint Services and blogs, wikis and RSS, according to the conference agenda. And explaining how Groove's offline-collaboration capabilities fit into Microsoft's collaboration picture is slated to be another hot button.

Microsoft also will introduce at the conference a few brand-new capabilities, such as a new SharePoint search feature known as "Knowledge Network."

Knowledge network is "not just about finding documents," said DelBene. "It's also about finding people."

Without divulging product specifics, DelBene explained that the Knowledge Network will enable SharePoint users to find experts in their organizations on a variety of topics. Once a set of experts are located, these people will be able to collaborate to "collectively solve business problems," DelBene said. Customers' "expertise information" will be integrated right into SharePoint.

In spite of the wealth of features offered by SharePoint, not all customers are sold. Some said they are still confused over the SharePoint branding. Others said they don't feel the integration between Windows and SharePoint is sufficient.

"SharePoint needs to have seamless integration (with Windows) and the ability to copy, move and map drives like a file share without the need for a Web front end," said one user with a major Microsoft customer, who requested anonymity. "That would be ideal."

But the biggest "brake" on SharePoint could end up being cultural, according to Directions on Microsoft's Helm.

SharePoint "requires changing the way people work. We all know how to share files with Windows, while SharePoint and document management systems in general are still terra incognita. The experience of document management vendors like EMC/Documentum and FileNet suggests that you can't make those kinds of changes overnight."