>> At one point we were going to use it at work (although nobody I spoke 
>> to could tell me what it's supposed to do or why we need it or what we 
>> would use it for beyond "sharing stuff").
> 
> It's useful if you have groups of people working on documents. Rather 
> than sending various versions by mail, you put them into sharepoint. 
> Sharepoint (even the free version) has versioning and checkout/checkin 
> of documents, as well as tracking who made what changes and workflow (so 
> the system can mail someone when a document is uploaded, make a copy 
> somewhere when the document is 'approved', prevent changes while it's in 
> a certain status, etc)
> 
> It's a quick and easy to build intranet portal. No web 
> design/developmetn skills are required to edit lists in sharepoint, so 
> the secretary can add news items, calendar entries, announcements and 
> the like

We have purchased a "document control system" that we use to store all 
our procedure documents and revise/approve them, etc. It's not a very 
*good* system, but there we are. (It's very over-complicated for what it 
actually does. And yet, at the same time, it's very inflexible. It will 
only do things in a certain way, etc.)

It used to be a client/server package (which was quite slow), but now 
it's web-based (which is even slower). One nice feature is that you must 
manually turn off web caching on your browser, and disable all web 
caching between your machine and the web server, or the thing 
malfunctions. (In other words, the designers don't know how to write web 
apps properly.) Also only works with specific combinations of Java and 
Acrobat.

Still, I guess I should think myself lucky. It can't be long now before 
they move it to Terminal Services, and then I'll have a huge raft of 
*new* problems to worry about...

This is perhaps why we never did get Sharepoint.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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