What The Hell Does Sharepoint Do?
solutionyogi: What's up with all the MS hate? This thread reads like a Slashdot thread and not an HN thread. Pardon me, I feel that the OP is not sincere. He already has a preconceived notion (OP quote, 'it seems to be pretty crappy and hard to explain') about the  product and wants to reinforce it.Sharepoint is first and foremost, a document management platform. Ever worked in a company where important documents are kept on a network share? Sharepoint can replace those network shares, provide web based access to all shared company documents. It also supports versioning and users can checkout/check in documents from within the Office application. E.g. if I open a Word document from Office and start editing it, it will be checked out and when I save it, it will check in those changes. It is completely transparent (you really have to try it to appreciate the seamless way it works) and non technical users don't even notice it. In fact, dare I say that Sharepoint has successfully solved the 'checkout/check in' problem for non-technical users.Sharepoint offers wiki/group calendar as others have mentioned.Sharepoint offers something similar to Google Spreadsheet where multiple users can update a web based spreadsheet simultaneously.Sharepoint is also a collaboration platform where you can plugin your custom code to customize the Sharepoint portal. In fact, at my last company, a Fortune 100 company BTW, they customized Sharepoint and used it as an Intranet. The Intranet was a huge improvement compared to the existing manually maintained site they had. I think they developed the Intranet in around 3.5 months using 2 developers which is very impressive. The best part is that if you know .NET framework and ASP.NET, you only need to learn a little bit before you can start customizing the portal.Name me a single product which provides seamless integration with Office applications, versioning, wiki, group calendar and above all a platform on which you can build on to streamline your processes. Additionally, it's easy to find Sharepoint developers OR train your existing staff to learn and modify it as it uses .NET/ASP.NET framework. For a company which already uses Windows platform, I think Sharepoint is a complete no-brainer.If you have further questions, ask away.