I’m hoping to hear from a cross-section of folks who have SharePoint installed at their site. I’m trying to decide whether to have users just use the web-based interface to check-out and edit my application’s files, then rely on them being sophisticated enough to know to go back to the SharePoint web interface and perform a check-in.
My presumption was that for the average organization out there using SharePoint, this would be incomprehensible to a good percentage of users. So, I began working on using SharePoint web services from within my application, so that users could open files, edit them, then check them in (optionally) at file close time — all from within my app. However, my initial estimate of the development time to accomplish this fell short. So now I’m at the point of wanting to do some cost/benefit analysis.
How quickly and naturally do most users ‘get’ the check-out/edit locally/check-in cycle of SharePoint?
As OTisler mentioned, it’s somewhat of a mess in Office 2003. The story is in fact much better in Office 2007, as Word, Excel, PP, etc. are all MOSS-aware, and reflect it in their menus, information bars w/ MOSS metadata, etc.
FWIW, I’ve done a few projects where a large (> 1,000 users/site) userbase was interacting with it, and the biggest problem was ‘he/she has my file checked out!’ It’s just a matter of educating the users that the answer is to call the offending user, not the help desk.