SharePoint services/portal

[xzile33]

My company is thinking about implementing Sharepoint Portal server. Can anyone give me any insight. The Pros and Cons. What you did like. And what you didn't like.

[haris_09]

Sharepoint Portal Server is a great solution for the companies who wants to manage their internal departments and contents in a secure way. Any questions you can ask me

[Ubik]

I don't like how two lists cannot talk to each other.

I don't like how you cannot have a picture field in a list, and not have it link to either edit the item or view the item.

I don't like having to spend $2k for ISA and other server equipment just to run a severely resource-eating monster.

I really hate the search indexing.

The HTML generated by SP is horrible. I mean REALLY BAD. Some of the styles are even hard-coded, what is up with THAT?

I dislike the ambiguity of the terms. People in general don't uinderstand 'portal', 'Team Site', WSS, STS, and the difference between them, and everytime they come out with another release, they change the meanings of the terms.

Windows SharePoint Services is free, but to get the really good stuff, you gotta buy Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server.

Other than that, it's 'just ok'.

Seems to me that a lot of people don't really understand the power of SharePoint, so they just use it to host a few lists, similar applications can be programmed by a caveman using Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP for free.

[skilled1]

I actually agree with Ubik on alot of his points, however if your company has a very large Operations side, or a N.O.C. then they have quite a bit of documents that anyone needs at one point in time, and then is worth it.

[Ubik]

Yes, we have a very large operations side, and NOC. We have 200,000 employees and millions of documents, but we have found that sharepoint is not something we are interested in.

However, we have some departments that insist on using it, and I am the guy who has to support them, for the most part, and it is relatively easy, but I know the hardware guys are complaining about the resources being used, mainly CPU, and storage and db stuff. We have nine servers altogether, six production and three test. Two for load balancing, one for db and search index, and I am not sure how the other ones are set up. (Those millions of documents I was talking about are not stored using sharepoint.)