July 26 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp.'s Office SharePoint Server, a program that lets companies set up Web sites, search for data and organize corporate documents, topped $800 million in sales in the year that ended June 30.

Sales of SharePoint, introduced in 2001, have grown faster than any other piece of software in company history, Business Division President Jeff Raikes said. Microsoft says it has sold more than 85 million licenses to 17,000 customers.

Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker, is finding that faster adoption of SharePoint pushes customers to switch to the new version of Microsoft's Office business programs because the features work better together, said Heather Bellini, an analyst at UBS AG in New York. It also fuels sales of products such as the SQL database package.

``SharePoint is doing much better than people give them credit for,'' said Bellini, the top-rated software analyst by Institutional Investor magazine. ``It doesn't sound that exciting, but when I speak to CEOs of big software resellers, they say people are signing enterprise agreements for Office 2007 just because of SharePoint.''

Microsoft will announce the revenue numbers today at an annual meeting with financial analysts at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The latest versions of both Office and SharePoint were released broadly in January.

The shares have gained 26 percent since the same event last year on optimism about its new Windows Vista operating system and Office 2007 software. Shares of Microsoft fell 73 cents to $29.98 as of 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading.

Team Sites

SharePoint can be used to create so-called portals and team sites, or internal Web sites where workers can collaborate on projects, share drafts and process forms. It retains and tracks files and allows workers to search for data stored on a network.

The program also can underpin external Web sites and lets employees search for which co-worker is an expert on a certain topic or oversees a particular account.

Pacific Life Insurance is speeding up adoption of Office 2007 in order to move to the latest version of SharePoint, Chief Information Officer Cameron Cosgrove said.

Newport Beach, California-based Pacific Life, which sells insurance and investment products to more than half of the 100 largest U.S. companies, has about 300 people using SharePoint now and plans to roll the program out to 3,000.

Without the software, employees had to remember which hard- drives contained what information, Cosgrove said.

Ballmer's Vacation

Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer returned from Christmas vacation this year demanding Raikes do a better job marketing SharePoint and showing customers it is more than just a product for creating Web sites, Raikes said in an interview.

``Jeff, it's not one, but three! three! three! products in one,'' Raikes said, imitating Ballmer's pitch to him.

Standing in the way are competitors including International Business Machines Corp., Oracle Corp., SAP AG and BEA Systems Inc., as well as smaller firms such as Documentum Inc.

Monsanto Co. uses SharePoint to locate research notebooks. Statoil ASA, Norway's biggest petroleum company, replaced a system based on Armonk, New York-based IBM's Lotus Notes with SharePoint for use by 25,000 employees and 4,000 partners. Viacom Inc. and Hawaiian Airlines Inc. run their public Web sites on SharePoint, SharePoint Director Tom Rizzo said.

To drive demand for SharePoint and SQL Server, Microsoft includes a more basic version of SharePoint free in the Windows Server operating system.

``The most interesting thing about SharePoint is the way Microsoft is using it to get inside corporations, and once inside, to further their grip,'' said Gartner Inc. analyst Mark Gilbert.

Between the free and paid versions, as many as 70 percent of organizations polled by Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner said they intend to use the software.

``There has never been this kind of interest in a product that has just been released in this space,'' Gilbert said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Dina Bass in Seattle at dbass2@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 26, 2007 16:13 EDT