Something Good & Something Bad about SharePoint [closed]

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Pros:

• Document management is its most well-known function and integrates extremely well with Office 2007.
• Create group calendars that can be overlayed onto your personal Outlook and managed on the web.
• Notifications in response to certain actions on the group website
• Wiki-type functionality with full integration into the Office stack.
• Full database backend which gives you the reliability and safety of a true RDBMS.
• Extremely customizable if you choose to develop custom websites using ASP.NET (not the built-in wizard/gui editor).
• Form-data collection

Cons:

• Freebie version is somewhat limited on customization.
• How to handle multiple editors to a single file is not obvious.
• Workflow for offline editing of documents is non-obvious.
• Very steep learning curve to use it the right way.
• Getting people to use it is like getting people to go to the dentist.
• Out-of-the-box templates don't do a lot.
• Customizing without writing code really limits your options.
• Integration with older versions of office is ugly
• Mac integration is non-existant (has this changed recently?)