Sharepoint - Not So Evil

I’ve been in a Sharepoint class all week. I looked forward to this about as much as a root canal. I’ve always loved open source, have been developing and promoting Drupal, and generally railing against the Microsoft Borg throughout my web development career. However, my employer just happened to drop a hundred grand or so on a Sharepoint installation, and my group is tasked with deploying it.

Sharepoint’s biggest strength appears to be document management, something that Drupal doesn’t do well at all out of the box. I imagine bringing my co-workers up to speed on Sharepoint will be much easier than endlessly saying “You can use the wiki for that” or explaining, again, that windows share paths don’t really work consistently from a Linux server… The strength of Sharepoint will be in it’s ready adoption by our users.

So far, I see Drupal still being superior for ease of design modifications and extensibility. Sharepoint requires Sharepoint Designer 2007 (free now at least) to do any real design modifications. It seems you can do some cool data integration with that tool as well. Web Parts seem roughly equivalent to Drupal modules, although most web parts are commercial, and seem to require .Net programming expertise to create.

Drupal won’t make it into the Enterprise as an alternative to Sharepoint - there is too much functionality that most business users need now, out of the box, that Sharepoint provides. And, the basic Sharepoint functionality (WSS) is free with Windows Server.

I am actually looking forward to learning more, and helping to successfully rollout this tool to our users.