What can you do on Sharepoint that you couldn’t just do with a shared drive/folder? I like the idea, but I’m struggling to see the real benefits where people will actually use it.

Archive

Version control, metadata, workflow, search

Version Control

But if you don’t put the effort in to make it suit your business, then yes its an expensive alternative to a shared drive.

Plus using sharepoint you can alter the layout and look to be more user friendly.

It also does indexing so you can search for a term that is inside a document.

But if you don’t put the effort in to make it suit your business, then yes its an expensive alternative to a shared drive.

We’re only small and this is my worry…
About 20 people might use this.

We have this issue at work, people seem to think that sharepoint is like a file server with a fancy web front end that allows you to check doc in / out. Perhaps back in 2002 it was, but now its essentially a massive extensible application platform. If you just want to collaborate on documents, there are much better and more cost effective ways of doing it. (box.com, dropbox pro etc)

Actually, the latest versions of SP will let multiple users simultaneously edit documents too, like to see DropBox help with that 🙂

(Not especially a SP fan BTW, spend more time swearing at it from a developer perspective than actually using it)

We’re only small and this is my worry…
About 20 people might use this.

I’d say 20 was a close call, depends how much sharing you are doing. A shared drive is very easy but you do need people to talk to each other and a good back up so you don’t accidentally lose something. Easy enough with a small group much harder as the group gets bigger. My last team we had about 12 people sharing a drive with 4 doing the vast bulk of the work on shared files. It was easy enough to manage without any extra software.

Hmm, it does inter-domain and inter-forest simultaneous collaboration extraordinarily badly. And any advanced features like conditional formatting in documents are out.

It works well for companies (in the SME context)that have staff working remotely.

If you have 20 staff all in the same office and just want basic file sharing, SharePoint is probably not your answer.

If running SharePoint internally you also need to take into consideration maintenance, patching, reliability and disaster recovery. All much easier with a file share if you don’t need the more advanced features of SharePoint.

As other’s have said, it works well for document version control. I’ve implemented it a few times for this reason.

Thanks for the feedback. I think for us and where we are right now this will just be another one of those things that may get used in first couple of months and then get dropped. I can see the value in document control for procedures, etc. but it’s probably not good value for money for our purposes just yet.

Sharepoint has always felt like one of those things where, if it is the answer, you haven’t understood the question properly.

Rachel

inter-forest simultaneous collaboration

WTF? I recently went into a forest with some mates at the same time so we could hang out together. I didn’t need SharePoint for that.

Thanks for the feedback. I think for us and where we are right now this will just be another one of those things that may get used in first couple of months and then get dropped. I can see the value in document control for procedures, etc. but it’s probably not good value for money for our purposes just yet.

There are some free alternatives available but will take more work to get up and running. I believe Moodle does a similar type of thing but is aimed at more of a virtual learning environment with document management tagged in.

Moodle is the most counter-intuitive platform around. If you think you should achieve something in 3 clicks then Moodle will let you do it in 14. An online repository for enabling “students” to access documents is about as good as it gets. Avoid.

Moodle is the most counter-intuitive platform around. If you think you should achieve something in 3 clicks then Moodle will let you do it in 14. An online repository for enabling “students” to access documents is about as good as it gets. Avoid.

I did say they’d need a bit more work lol 😉

We’re only small and this is my worry…

Sharepoint Foundation is a free product, if that helps any.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35488