SharePoint University

Hi, is sharepoint popular? It seems like it's hard to find resources on the Internent.  A lot of forums on the net don't have that much of info.

SharePoint is growing in popularity. It is a great platform that many organizations are beginning to use to foster collaboration and sharing. However, because SharePoint 2007 is so new (and has a tremendous number of new features), resources are still a bit slim. However, there are more and more people beginning to contribute to the community, so resources are growing faster and faster. There are a number of good books already out on the new platform -- and many more slated before the end of the year or early next year.

I've found that the people on here are very informative and have come to my aid many times. Just be sure to include as much information about your problem so they can have a good basis to help!

Regarding the popularity issue, I agree with WestDocs... it's growing and will get larger.

When you look at the resources Microsoft used for integration of SharePoint 2007 with MS Office 2007, you can see a bit of their crystal ball strategy. I've been telling people that if you own MS Office 2007 in an enterprise environment and are not using SharePoint 2007, you are wasting a major piece of functionality within MS Office.

I am betting that most corporations using MS Office and Exchange will eventually roll over to SharePoint.

Regards,
Mark

One thing to note is that Microsoft considers SharePoint a vital part of their business strategy. They have moved almost all (if not all) of their public facing websites to SharePoint. They also are building in-roads from several major product lines straight into SharePoint. For example, Project 2007 is now on top of WSS 3.0 out of the box. Exchange 2007 includes new managed folders that can be used to route important email into SharePoint. Some of their new system management packages are slated to make use of SharePoint as part of the user interface.

Keeping this in mind will help you understand how important Microsoft considers SharePoint. It will probably soon be as common in business environments as Exchange or SQL.

Its Microsoft's best selling product to date...

The new capabilities are also going to drive it into the enterprise space and actually be a competitor against other major players in the mass collaboration/peep production workspace(s) that it has lacked in previous versions.  Along the lines of wests post about it connecting into other Microsoft applications gives better visibility into daily business and gives users the information they need quickly and in the correct format (given it was setup correctly).  It also plays well with other external applications away from the Microsoft stack using tools like the Business Data Catalog (BDC) for business intelligence.

 westdccs -- In regards to the Project 2007/Project Server piece; we notice that the main project workspace still uses the old 2003 Web Components which has caused alot of confusion because it looks and acts differently than the new Reporting and Analytics in MOSS.  Have you worked with Project Server 2007 onto of MOSS?  If so, which reporting mechanism have you used and why?

sharepointcommunity:

westdccs -- In regards to the Project 2007/Project Server piece; we notice that the main project workspace still uses the old 2003 Web Components which has caused alot of confusion because it looks and acts differently than the new Reporting and Analytics in MOSS.  Have you worked with Project Server 2007 onto of MOSS?  If so, which reporting mechanism have you used and why?

We are still in the implementation phase of Project, but it is loaded on top of MOSS in our environment. Once we begin the development of projects and deal with reporting I'll be glad to post an update. However, that may still be 3 months out as I'm now waiting on my network administrator to designate resources into the appropriate active directory groups for synchronization with Project.

Just an FYI - don't get too far off the beaten path with Project Server; it's not very forgiving in my experience.  From a Reporting perspective we went with the Reporting and Analytics portion of MOSS because we envision MS getting rid of the 2003 Web Components at some point.  We've also started looking at SQL Reporting Services and how that will interact with the BDC to display information inside web parts, etc...