Implementers of SharePoint Portal Server ????

Has anyone implemented a "typical" company intranet via SharePoint?  How did it go ?  We are currently looking at a re-do of our Intranet.  2 Things are putting sharepoint portal server at the head of the pack :  1) The Search functionality, 2) The close integration with Word, Excel, etc.

Just looking for any misc. comments on any surprises you might hit. 

Tim
Sunday, May 23, 2004

And how is the stability?

Tim
Sunday, May 23, 2004

philo, share your knowledge here

Sunday, May 23, 2004

One of my clients implemented SharePoint and Team Services a couple of years ago when they were still relatively new.

Overall, they are happy with it, but it's not been without a lot of headaches. The stability hasn't been all that wonderful. They would frequently have to bounce the SharePoint server because it would simply stop responding to web requests. Several phone calls to Microsoft and the best advice they could get was "Reboot the server occassionally".

Where SharePoint has really shined is the ability to integrate corporate applications with it's document management systems. Rather than having documents scattered across the network, everything is centralized in SharePoint and all of the applications that I write for them use SharePoint as the datastore. Whether it be a fat-client or an intranet web site, we can search and pull from SharePoint.

Now...the current version of SharePoint is completely different than the version I've worked with. The new version uses SQL Server for a datastore instead of the hideous Exchange Web Data Store which is largely to blame for stability problems.

Overall, although SharePoint has given me tons of headaches, much of that was due to the fact it was relatively new when my client implemented it. Even with all the problems, I'd still recommend it because it does a have a solid feature set and apparently the new version is much more stable.

Mark Hoffman
Sunday, May 23, 2004

I was told I couldn't talk about SharePoint on here. Something about "guerilla marketing."

However, since I've been building a few portals over the past few months, anyone who needs advice is welcome to email me. :-)

Philo

Philo
Sunday, May 23, 2004

Isn't sharepoint somehow in competition with CityDesk?
What is Joel thinking about this issue?
Is his niche going away due to big Microsoft?

Michael Moser
Monday, May 24, 2004

No way. SharePoint and CityDesk fill completely different niches, and in fact do pretty much different things.

Philo

Philo
Monday, May 24, 2004

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