What The Hell Does Sharepoint Do?
nl: It is usually sold as a way to make Office collaborative. It also has a set of badly implemented other features which allow it to check boxes on product comparison feature lists.It also sucks.It sucks like Microsoft products used to suck, back when Microsoft was evil, not just irrelevant.Did you ever use Windows 3.1? It's roughly that level of quality - crashes frequently, is difficult to navigate and relies on people begging others to do things that should be easy ("can you upload this document because I can't find the correct place").As a specific example, one of the primary use-cases for it involves a person uploading a word document, and then other finding it. The problems with uploading are numerous, but we'll ignore them for the moment (sufficient to say that depending on which version of Word you have you may or may not be able to save directly to the Sharepoint repository, and of course it might crash while saving, losing anything you have done). The real problem is the search - by default it only searches on office metadata, so finding "Template for xxx" is no problem, but unless everyone correctly sets up their metadata you can never find the documents. Apparently it can be reconfigured to index content as well, but at in the first place I came across it I found it more effective to build my own search index by crawling the webdav directly structure (That was in Java, with NTLM authentication, extracting text from MS office document - so that shows how "easy" it was). The company used that index for years, because Sharepoint was so sucky.Sharepoint sucks - I hope Google Wave kills it, but if you are doing a start up aimed at it please, please, please succeed!