Microsoft Sharepoint

I have some experience with it.

Firstly, there are several different things which Microsoft call "Sharepoint".

One is Sharepoint Team Services, which is a web application bundled (optionally of course) with Windows Server 2003.

This is basically a rather poor todo list / document management system.

The main one is "Sharepoint portal server", which is a decent (Possibly excellent) document management system with a shoddy portal tacked on as an afterthough.

Be sure you know which one of these things you want to do.

If you're after a general extranet / todo list / lightweight DMS, don't bother. There are other things which do it at least as well.

If you're prepared to pay for the client licences, by all means evaluate SPS as a heavyweight document management system (Ignore its portal functionality; it's not worth bothering with).

Mark

Thanks, and yes the portal end is what we are usuing it for more so then the documents actually, but that was planned for the long run, the idea was to have each department make their own "site" but from my playing with it, it seems such a bear that I dont think it would be any easier then just having IT continue to run "sites" for departments

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Original post by Justaddwater Thanks, and yes the portal end is what we are usuing it for more so then the documents actually, but that was planned for the long run, the idea was to have each department make their own "site" but from my playing with it, it seems such a bear that I dont think it would be any easier then just having IT continue to run "sites" for departments

While working at Microsoft, most groups used Sharepoint, and we had a lot of success with it. One thing it is REALLY good at doing is automating simple tasks, such as putting up a quick survey or registration page on the web. We used it a lot to get information on who was going to do what outside of work activity (we were interns), as well as what they could contribute (cars, etc.) To do that type of stuff, it takes only a few minutes to set up.