At work we are in the process of rolling out Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 across the college, and as a result I went on a three-day training course in Milton Keynes to get up to speed with the system.
SharePoint is best described as a Content Management System, or a Portal system. It is designed to allow users to create web pages, and to expose information from external systems via web pages. We are using it to allow departments to easily publish information that they may find useful to other departments, and also to give each user their own MySite (a personal space that they can use to upload anything they like).
SharePoint is a massive system however. It takes a multitude of servers to get the content to the end users, and installing it is not a simple process. There are additional systems that need to be linked in, and customisations such as themes and templates need to be installed. It is, however, a massively customisable system as well. There are dozens of page and site templates, from blog publishing to document storage to website homepages, and there are features such as workflows and approval tied in at every level if needed.
This makes it an incredibly useful and powerful system, but also incredibly complicated. All through the training, and in my normal use at work, it is apparent how difficult it can be to enable the simplest features. Many of the options are in unintuitive places, which can be very time consuming when you need to enable something on a multitude of sub-sites.
The training did show me a lot of useful things though, and I am looking forward to trying some of them out on our system at work.
