Sharepoint or how a rolling stone gathers MOSS 3.0

So I attended a microsoft Connections event this morning because one of my clients wants to review sharepoint and CRM 3.0.

Let's stick to Sharpeoint as it is much more interesting.
First of all, how many people know what is involved to install this application?

The presenter, Jeffrey Lin did an excellent job. Even answered some hard questions. Did a great demo. Now the part he didn't mention, although I asked one piece of it.

You need Exchange, SQL and (I love this one) Windows Sharepoint Server 2.0!
WHAT!? Some upgrade.

Now those of you in Lotus la la land who have let Sharepoint in to your organization now have a huge fight. Exchange is now available to anyone who wants it and you can see where that leads.

All because you did not want to push the Domino products? Quickplace was/is a great product, Quickr is even better. No limitations, no giant message store.

Now I can see Sharepoint looks smoother and more professional than Quickplace but functionality, out of the box, is what is important. Anyone can pay a development house to make your site prettier.
Microsoft goes out of their way to integrate it to Outlook/Exchange and use SQL as its repository. And then there is Live messenger added to if you want presence/IM.

So again you have to add all five pieces(Exchange/SQL/WSS 2.0/MOSS 3.0/Live) and services to get what comes in 1 Domino servers with a Sametime added on one and a Quickr server.

Now here is something from a report dated March 2006 done by the great state of North Dakota. Page 5

"In addition, the cost of providing access to SharePoint sites outside of State government is
prohibitive, so it is recommended that SharePoint be available only from within the
State’s firewall, thus VPN access would be required for external users, who would also
need an AD account and the associated AD CAL.

SharePoint’s history of upgrades has not been smooth. Each new version of the product
has been a wholesale redesign without an automated migration path, and each site would
be manually duplicated after a version update."

I could not have said it better. While this is from a year and half ago, some of this has not changed. There still is not path to upgrade well. But they got the repository in SQL so that is at least better news.
WSS 2.0 was like an odd file server the way it worked.

And hey, try attaching a few 100+MB files into your MOSS and see if it stays healthy.