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

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?)