Reflections on a sharepoint course.

Last week I was in Brisbane on a MS SharePoint Course. I was there as a last minute stand-in , so was really there as an observer only. I now know why MS has changed the name so Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS). I would describe SharePoint as the Access of Collaboration. It is really very good at doing what it can do, the integration with office products is very good, the way you can publish meta-data about word documents is great, and I really like the data retrieval services integration between excel/access and SharePoint.

But the programmability of the product is far to limited, and for MS to even suggest that this is a competitive product with IBM Domino is quite a joke. Having said that if I was I an SMB and wanted to do some smart document sharing or maintain some shared lists of data, and didn’t have the skill sets to write code myself I would choose SharePoint as a solution. But like Access I think you would very quickly realise that extending any solution beyond something simple is going to bring a lot of pain.

I do however wonder why large enterprises with SQL server and .net experience would even purchase this product?? Maybe it comes in the bundle ??