I'm trying to wrap my head around SharePoint. Why is it good? Why is it bad?
At a glance it appears to offer some incredible collaboration tools. However, the cost looks astronomical and it seems to be rigid & difficult to customize.
To those who've worked with SharePoint; please describe something good and something bad about it.
It has pretty good Office 2007 integration. As an example, Excel understands when you have a file checked out and will let you check it in (with comments) when you close it. The document management features simplistic version control (although it's not required; you can go with a single version for each file).
In SharePoint, everything is essentially a list internally and it's very easy to create a custom one. On a related note, I haven't used either yet, but it supposedly works well with workflows and InfoPath.
On the downside, it's pretty much a resource beast. It requires multiple machines with powerful specs, particularly if you want to "really" use it for document management and to be the backbone of your intranet/internet site. It scales to an extent, but it's not pretty from my vantage point.
Customizing it presents it's own challenges. You really need people focused on it full time, as both administration and customization require their own impressive learning curves.
Lastly, some of the out of the box parts are poorly implemented. The wiki is a prime example; it's basically useless in my opinion. So one thing to keep in mind is that some may consider SharePoint as a whole package as "best in class" (not saying I do!), its individual features often are not.
Good thing: Great communication tool. Instead of sending out a company wide email you can post an announcement to your SharePoint site. Users can subscribe to an RSS feed of the announcements or have a email alert sent to them when the list is updated.
Bad thing: Error messages displayed on a SharePoint site are generic and the link to help resolve the issue rarely is of any help.
A lot of the cool things in Sharepoint are avaialable in Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0, which is free with windows server 2003/2008. All you need extra is a license for SQL Server 2000 and later, which most mirosoft shops have. In WSS you can do document management, workflows, custom sites, blogs, wiki's, etc.
If you need Excel Services, Forms Server, CMS, or some of the other MOSS features, then that's another thing. And yes, it does cost a lot of money, but it' cheaper than doing it from scratch in most cases.
Pluses:
- Great object model.
- A lot of good features just come out of the box.
Minuses: - Steap learning curve to do things the right way. - It's very easy to hang yourself by doing things the wrong way. - Debugging and deployment is about as pleasurable as root canal.
Pros:
Cons:
Good:
It can be a great collaboration tool. Beginning developing for sharepoint is simple, assuming you are familar with ASP.NET webparts.
Bad:
The development lifecycle isn't fully implemented. There are no built-in facilities for testing, among other things.
good :
A lot of things can be done. Wokflowks, InfoPath forms, Excel Services, Business Data Catalogs and etc.
Bad :
You won't be able to do these described easily. Must have sharepoint administrative and development skills for good solutions that don't improve quickly.
If you have a license for Microsoft Server 2003 then you can install the standalone version of Sharepoint for FREE! Download Sharepoint
The install is very simple when using the internal database.
Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer 2007 is a must have for any customization.
I have created a couple Company Intranets using Sharepoint and have been very pleased with its features. Microsoft Office 2007 interfaces nicely with sharepoint.
I have found Sharepoint to be very powerful and easy to learn. There are lots of people developing sites using sharepoint. The level of customization is awesome. The simplest customization is done in your browser, the next level is using Microsoft Sharepoint Designer 2007, and finally using Visual Studio to create new apps(webparts).
SharePoint is evolving and becoming a better collaboration tool for Microsoft Office environments. It plays well in a small to medium sized business setting. It is critical to implement “best practices” on setup; otherwise it will quickly become a nightmare to maintain and to use.
For “best practices” here are two books that I recommend for SharePoint 2007:
Good Out of the box, it offers a ton of functionality and power, even for the stock web parts. Just creating a library of documents that anyone can open/edit/upload to is simple...even for those non-web-savvy amongst us.
Bad Pretty much everything else.
It's a beast to use. And handing two complete rebranding projects for two totally different areas of the company is driving me to the point of a nervous breakdown. Especially when opening the core.css file occasionally results in all the styles I've redefined getting reset to the defaults. Without anything done by me other than just OPENING the file. And there is no ability to undo these changes.