Comments on: Sharing the love--and data--through SharePoint

Microsoft's SharePoint is the cornerstone of a plan to change the way office folks work, emphasizing real-time collaboration and universal access to documents.

A free alternative

If Sharepoint is too much for your budget, try Plone/Zope. Zope if a content management system. Plone sits on top of Zope to create a collbrative site similar to Sharepoint. See http://zope.org and http://plone.org

[dmanrique]

How much free'er is free?

Windows SharePoint Services is a free download for Windows Server 2003. Only when you need the additional features of SharePoint Portal Services, is there a cost.

[Syntax Heir]

I don't get it...

Maybe someone can set me straight here. Sharepoint is a place to put files so everyone can have access to them. Isn't that what I do with a file share on my file server?

Why is this any different? Is it web accessbile or accessible across different geographic locales?

[dmanrique]

Not about files...

SharePoint is not just about files, it is about Communication and Collaboration.

"Microsoft Windows® SharePoint Services delivers sites for team collaboration, productivity and information-sharing, facilitating large numbers of smart teams. Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 connects these sites, people, knowledge and business processes to facilitate smart organizations."

http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/default.asp

[Fray9]

Great..

Just what we need.. more "enhancements" crammed down our throats eating up system resources and creating a troubleshooting nightmare.

Collaboration versus Email ?

The article makes several interesting references to the notion that collaboration will only work when it is close to the users existing behavior. Email is probably the single most popular user application, and is collaboration's primary rival.

Its interesting that SharePoint, like the countless other web based collaborative tools that came before it, continue to ignore this fact and treat email and collaboration as two separate worlds. The user has a choice. History tells us that separate collaboration doesn?t work. File sharing alone, be that in the Windows file system or SharePoint file system or any other document mgt store, is not enough to 'crack the code' for most users.

To win users over, an approach is needed that gently lures users into collaboration from their existing Outlook email. For a view of how this could happen, its worth taking a look at http://www.kubisoftware.com