Sales rocket for Microsoft SharePoint Server

Microsoft on Friday said that its collaboration engine, SharePoint Server 2007, is growing faster than the company expected. And the UK is outstripping worldwide growth.

UK sales grew by 38 percent in the financial year 2007, compared to worldwide growth of 35 percent according to Rob Gray, SharePoint product marketing manager for the UK.

Gray said that the growth in revenue from SharePoint had exceeded Microsoft's estimations. "We were thinking of $500m (£241m) a year by the end of the quarter and instead it was $800m (£394m)," he said.

He puts the growth down to internal efforts but also to the strength of the company's partners. "They have really taken this on board," he said.

One of those partners is the government health website, NHS Direct. "They have really adopted SharePoint," he said. "The areas which have really grown quickly have been Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Search."

Microsoft in June launched a Web 2.0 add-on for SharePoint Server that enables businesses to make use of popular collaboration features such as wikis and blogs.