According to supremo Bill Gates, 100 million licenses have already been sold for SharePoint, and the software not has over 100 million licensees, generating in excess of a staggering $1 billion in sales.

As Gates prepares to retire from Microsoft after 30 years at its helm, it is clear that he still has the success of SharePoint on his mind.

He told a SharePoint conference: "SharePoint is based on a vision of letting workers share information in a better way. It is the next evolution in what we started with Microsoft Office.

"Served by software, executives will be better informed to make quicker decisions and collaborate."

He said that pulling together a company's information into a set of blogs, wikis and webpages would have been impossible 10 years ago but that today there were no limits.

Analysts have said that the unprecedented popularity of SharePoint Server is one of the most remarkable developments in the technology world for some time. Mike Gotta, an analyst with the Burton Group commented: "I have not seen anything like this since the early days of [Lotus] Notes.

This content management and intelligence product has caused a real buzz among corporate users having taken the business world by storm, SharePoint, is closely integrated to the existing Microsoft Office suite including Outlook, Excel, Word and PowerPoint.

SharePoint Server 2007 is available now from Genesis Communications, click here to find out about SharePoint Server 2007.