On Tuesday, Microsoft quietly rolled out 30 free, downloadable applications that build on top of the company's SharePoint Services collaboration/workflow technology that is built into Windows Server.

Among the plethora new applications are horizontal and vertical applets both. Schedule-management, consumer-financing, employee-training, event-management, travel-request, classroom-management, campaign-management and other similar types of offerings are available immediately.

Microsoft made the new applications available for download from the Microsoft.com site for Windows Server 2003 users.

By the time Office 12 ships in the latter half of 2006, Microsoft will make a whole portfolio of these kinds of SharePoint applications available, said Jason Bunge, senior product manager with Windows SharePoint Services. This portfolio will include these 30 applications, plus some, as-yet-to-be-determined additional ones, Bunge said.

"The impetus for these applications was that some of our customers were struggling with SharePoint adoption," said Bunge. "We wanted to find ways to show the value to these users."

Peter O'Kelly, a senior analyst with The Burton Group, agreed with Microsoft's assessment.

"There's still considerable confusion in the market about the extent to which SharePoint can be used for building collaborative applications, so the SharePoint Services application templates are likely to be very popular," O'Kelly said. "Lotus did something similar when Notes was getting started, with a set of 50 templates for various application domains."

Bunge said that the applications can be used without customization, but are also fully extensible, as well, by customers and/or partners. He said that Microsoft believes the new applications will appeal to customers of all sizes.

Rob Helm, director of research with Directions on Microsoft, said Microsoft's decision to release a library of SharePoint applications makes a lot of sense.

"The massive sales of (Windows) Small Business Server have given it a large installed base of Windows SharePoint Services in organizations that might not immediately know what to do with it. The fact that Windows SharePoint Services is free with Windows Server 2003 might also mean there are a bunch of departments and branch offices out there interested in giving it a whirl, but figuring out how to organize it for their own job and unit functions can be quite a challenge," Helm explained.

"I wouldn't be surprised to see some of these applications ship in the Windows SharePoint Services 12 product, the same way that the previous version shipped with an issue tracking application," Helm added.