I am new to Sharepoint, starting to learn how to develop for it. From the first few chapters of the book I am reading, it doesn't seem like you can do too much with it.
So I ask, what is the best thing you've developed for Sharepoint? I am just trying to get a feel for the types of things that can be developed for Sharepoint (plus you can stroke your ego a bit).
SharePoint 2010 and 2007 are both built on top of the .NET Framework, and have a rich object model, so you can build quite complex applications on top of it. You have to work within the constrains on building on top of the SharePoint platform of course, and there are headaches and scale limitations that come from this, but beyond that you aren't very limited in what kind of business application you create on top.
I have implemented reengineered business processes on top of the platform, with complex workflows that route tasks to different people based on complex business logic. My team has created entire business applications on top of SharePoint instead of doing it completely custom, in order to leverage the CRUD and security functionality already in there. At the end of the day, it did everything we needed, despite the box we had to operate in being it was not fully custom on top of just a framework like .NET or J2EE.
I built an insurance claims management system for a multi billion dollar insurance company. The size of their SharePoint farm was second only to that of Microsoft.
I also run my blog on SharePoint. :-) http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog
SharePoint is brilliant for making a collaboration portal. Say you want a provide a system for an organisation where people can share documents and other bits of information.
SharePoint is also very good at other things like web content management (google this). You can create websites which are manageable by the clients and scalable to whatever the needs may be.
The real value of SharePoint is in what it does out of the box. There are lots of features (too many to go into in this post) but the main benefit of SharePoint is that a) its been developed by Microsoft and will be king for a long time b) You know that the product has been well tested and supported. Since SharePoint has many out of the box features, the value to the developer is that he or she can develop a huge site without putting in huge amounts of time and effort (you could argue many other systems also do this), but because this is a Microsoft product, it is widely trusted and therefore SharePoint developers are always required. Bottom line is, that results in some very good salaries being offered.
Personally I've worked on lots of large content management systems and Intranet site for many big organisations. One that stands out was creating a multi-lingual site for a government agency that needed to work across 3 international domains.
If you are visually inclined:
You can create cool websites with it.. see http://www.topsharepoint.com
(the 3rd highest rated site is especially awesome ;-) )