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Comment by jasonlbaptiste | Hacker News Reader

I didn't expect this thread to grow to 56 comments. Here's what astounds me: Sharepoint is Microsoft's fasting growing business ever. Faster than windows or office. It's also a source of 1 bil+ revenue a year. YET, comments from 40+ educated people who know technology very well cannot explain its purpose or real value. This is or something like it is what opportunity is supposed to look like.

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Has anybody here actually been involved in purchasing this product? What use case did it solve for you?

I have.

I had a small team that needed to share documents related to a consulting project. Everybody needed to use MS products, access it from the web, be able to check-in/check-out files, have a common calendar, a team blog, and a quick wiki for client-related information.

Sharepoint did all of that, in an integrated fashion, right out of the box. We got it hosted for about 30 bucks a month.

In addition, everything is an RSS feed. So as people change things on a thread you're watching, you can catch it right in your RSS reader.

Even SharePoint services built into server 2003/2008 is pretty usable out of the box. You can spend a few hours to a few days to get it configured depending how much tweaking you do (and how screwed up your servers and environment are already :-p). The newer version has pretty tight integration with office. It beats throwing everything in public folders since they are less flexible and harder to manage. It also beats people emailing big files around saying "Here, print this 20MB PowerPoint for me."

If you have a few offices or remote users it is really useful. Probably not even worth considering for less than 15 people and only if you have some existing infrastructure. For smaller teams a hosted solution or some of the other products mentioned might be a better fit. (123together.com and intermedia both are OK for hosted SharePoint/exchange etc) Also, the blog and wiki stuff is still sub-par but the check-in check out stuff for documents does work pretty well.

Absolutely.

I hate to come off like a fanboy, but I understand what Microsoft is trying to do with SharePoint and it makes sense to me.

I had another team that was just 2 or 3 guys working on a startup. We used basecamp and were very happy with it.

It depends on what you want and what your skill level is. If you're highly distributed and do a lot with Microsoft documents, then MOSS is a logical choice (and not extremely expensive). If you're just a couple of guys kicking around some code? Hack something together or use one of the simpler tools available on the web.

I'd draw the line somewhere around 4 or 5 guys, not 15 -- if you're doing something that's document-heavy. If it's just programming? I wouldn't consider it until I reached the 8-10 person team size, at least.

It's a microsoft-based web-centric document management and workflow system.

What part of that do people not understand?

Seems like you already have some sort of point or answer you're trying to get to. Perhaps it is "Microsoft sux and hackers can replace SharePoint!"

If so, then get to it. That Billion-dollar market awaits you.

http://docverse.com

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