What are the "cool" use cases for SharePoint?

Question

I went to the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 launch event in Minneapolis yesterday and was slightly surprised by how much they were trotting out SharePoint and improved SharePoint development in Visual Studio 2010.

SharePoint is something I've largely ignored over the years as a web developer and solution architect on a small development team. I was always under the impression that SharePoint was used mostly for intranets in large corporations, and that if you were developing for SharePoint, it meant that a corporate decision had been made to use it and you as a developer probably had few (if any) options.

I realize this assumption is probably incorrect. So, what are the "cool" uses for SharePoint? What unique business problems have you solved using it? What could make a developer excited to be working on something for SharePoint?

Answer 1

Document libraries in a Microsoft environment. There are many nice out-of-the-box features for managing documents.

Intranet sites that have permissions setup in such a way to allow business entities to control use of the site within their group.

Project requirements lists. List in SharePoint can be customized to some degree without ever programming.

As a conclusion so far, SharePoint is a blessing and a curse. It has a lot of value-adds, though anything outside that box is difficult change, but there are indeed many 'hooks' to do just that. WSS3.0 is free for Windows Server 2003, as is SP 2010 Foundation for Server 2008, so you can get quite a bit out of that without upgrading to MOSS or 2010 equivalent.

Answer 2

It's probably best used in intranet/extranet scenario's, true. There's many public facing internet sites built on it as well, if you find that cool :) See http://www.topsharepoint.com/ (I built one of the top-10 sites ;)

It's definately not the best web content management platform but it is not bad and companies like people who have learned to manage their intranet to be able to seamlessly do the same for the internet site.

Personally I find it "cool" that I can deliver functionality quickly and without building the world from scratch (I've built enough document management solutionettes and prefer not to do it ever again). But if I have to custom build there's many footholds for customization and all of the .NET platform is available. There's workflow solutions that allow business users to customize their own workflows and not bug me with them. I'm sure there's plenty of other solutions out there that can do something similar but the integration with Microsoft Office and the rest of the Microsoft world is quite good IMHO.

I don't understand the antagonism against SharePoint and find it's mostly fueled by ignorance and people trying to use the platform for something it wasn't meant to do (like being a relational database). You will have to learn it; it's not like adding ELMAH to your project, it's a really big layer in your architecture.