The Business of Software Wiki
A part of Joel on Software, and a companion to the Business of Software discussion group.
The Microsoft platform is a lot more than just Windows. Microsoft provides a huge amount of functionality across operating systems, database, and applications that ISVs are encouraged to leverage in their own applications. In fact, there are so many pieces to the platform that it can be difficult to know what's there and what to use. This page is intended to summarize the platform pieces and provide links to more information.
NOTE: the focus of this page is on technologies (both released and unreleased) that ISVs should consider building on today ... the purpose is NOT to provide an exhaustive version history of each product.
Office is sometimes overlooked as part of the development platform, but more and more ISVs are delivering applications that build on top of Office. Also, Office is no longer just a client product - the Office family includes servers (e.g., MOSS) as well.
SharePoint is one of the most important products in the Office product line for ISVs. There are two main versions:
There are a few more variations, such as Forms Server and SharePoint Server for Search. See this product comparison page for a spreadsheet detailing the feature differences between the various products.
Note about the original author: Patrick Foley is an ISV Architect Evangelist for Microsoft.
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