Sharepoint - Worth it for Small companies?

[TiG]

A bit of background to let you know what the query is and what to judge this on. I work for a small (40ish people) company, currently very poor in process and control functions. Someone here has got it into their head that sharepoint will improve this.

I have to say with my limited experience sharepoint was a pain to setup and required large amounts of maintenance, and a hell of a lot of configuration to ensure the correct people are locked out of documents they shouldn't have access too.

Anyone even possibily image this being sensible for a small company?, especially given how poor most people are at using any sensible storage structure.

TiG

[Moby-Dick]

Are you thinking of a small Sharepoint Team Site or a larger full portal ?

I dont think it requires more maintenance than a good permission structure in a shared folder.

If you used the full blown sharepoint server , then you can run team sites for different project groups - even down to individual homepages.

There is much more to sharepoint than the technical side , its the logical design of the site thats more important , to ensure that Knowledge is easy to find.

What you might like is the ability to code sharepoint 'webparts' to integrate with existing systems.

[TiG]

We don't need sharepoint as the technical team (of 6), we never leave the office and have a good structure via VSS. Its the rest of the company that the IT person is looking to use.

Its the sales force/onsite engineers/directors being out and about and the IT manager thinking that the best way to offer out document access.

I'd much rather a VPN setup and have all the documents secured internally, than sticking up on the web.

TiG

[stytagm]

We're a similar sized company (35 odd) and we do use Sharepoint, but mostly for customer-facing situations, document libraries, help documentation, bulletins and announcements etc. We don't use it for any kind of process or control.

I didn't set it up myself, one of my managers did, and he's not particularly technical, but it took him ages to get it to his liking.

For internal process stuff we use the trusty Subversion with Trac, both of which are well loved by people on this forum. I think a few people upstairs use Microsoft Project too, but that's mostly to draw pretty schedules to show to customers during sales pitches.

[Skinleech]

What about using shared folders in Outlook, with the correct permissions set for the users, and a html front-end to open them?

That's what we use for a large chunk of internal documentation, as we're still running NT4 here in our office, and Sharepoint needs XP.