I have had the opportunity to deploy Microsoft’s SharePoint Services and also Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. I have to admit, they really have it going on with these products.
My current employer is not going to proceed with a full blown deployment of SharePoint, which is too bad, but we do have a couple of small implementations that I maintain. During the last couple of days, I’ve been able to work with these small environments again, and it has renewed my disappointment in our lack of future deployment plans.
Once SharePoint is deployed, using it becomes very easy. If you can use MS Excel or Word, you can quickly figure out how to create customized lists in SharePoint. The integration with the Microsoft Office suite of applications is amazing. Organization of data and access to that data from virtually anywhere is wonderful. If I were a developer, I’d love to work with customization of SharePoint to see just what I could do with it. (I may try anyway)
My only complaint, so far, is the lack of integration with MS Office for Mac. To my knowledge, there is no integration on the Mac platform, which seems silly to me since Microsoft actively markets and develops the Office suite for Mac.
Given an opportunity, I would gladly work on the implementation of WSS or MOSS again. It’s a fabulous product that I haven’t been able to find a viable alternative to yet. I may just have to build myself a virtualized test environment so that I can continue to work with this great product.
I’ll post more about this in the future.
I’ve been in IT for over 25 years. As a result, I drink way too much coffee, my eye occasionally twitches, and no I will not fix your computer. I’m also a photographer, videographer, and an elder at my church.
Did I mention I like coffee?