Mary Jo Foley has an article over at eweek covering the apparent move by Microsoft to bundle ($5 if you get a Microsoft guy to say "bundle") a lot of server products they intended to roll out on their own into a single Office SharePoint Portal Server.

New to the Office 2007 server line up will be the Office Forms Server 2007, an electronic-forms offering designed to complement InfoPath; Office Groove Server 2007, a collaboration server based on the technology Microsoft acquired when it bought Groove Technology last year; and Office Project Portfolio Server 2007, a complement to Microsoft Project Server that is based on the UMT technology Microsoft acquired last year. But the big kahuna on the Office Server 2007 side is Office SharePoint Portal Server 2007. That offering will combine Microsoft's current Content Management Server, SharePoint Portal Server and what was expected to debut as a standalone Excel Server into a single product.

So here is what happened in Redmond earlier this week. This is inside info so please hush hush. Ballmer apparently got a hold of the Microsoft Licensing SKU book and flug it at one of the VP's. He threw out his shoulder, killed three Microsoft VP's and the building had to be evacuated as the SKU shattered the support beam in half. Joke aside, I think someone at Microsoft thought out loud and said: "Hey. We're dumping all this money in servers that nobody has ever bought. What if we got those PM's together and put together a solution instead of just telling our partners to figure it out at 10x the cost?" This is good for the partner because it offers a united solution to present to the client and it is good for the client because they now pay just twice as much for eight times the crap they do not need. Umm, Koolade tastes good today!

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