These are comments  made by listeners to a webinar I held on SharePoint.  I do not identify the comments’ makers, but I ensure you that they were each made by end user organizations.

Although only 6 in number, they are rich in real world perspective.

I do not comment on them except parenthetically to clarify the context of the comment.  You can pull from them what you want.

So with no further ado, and in no particular order:

“my current take on SharePoint: out-of-the-box, it’s an enhanced network drive. To use it as a real intranet, you need $125K in professional services.”

“Our organization is in the Somewhat Used area [referring to survey findings in which users were asked to rank the level of involvement with various Sharepoint functionality]. We have been using SPS 2003 and migrating to MOSS 2007, my largest issue is licensing cost. There is a big difference in standard vs enterprise for implementing the BPM, forms processing, records management and application development. ”

“This [assuming this refers to the webinar and survey findings]  is awesome. So good to know we are not alone in this pain. thank you”

“From a developer perspective, there are major hurdles to becoming effective – bad development environments, incomplete documentation, and a morphing architecture. No question, but giving some validation from the development prospective, which is driving the integration issues. Good work!

“Results [referring to the survey results] in general agreement with our experience. The learning curve for developers is VERY steep, however the benefits that can be derived (e.g. from BPM/WF) solutions is VERY high. We can now whip out workflows rather quickly, with huge benefits to the business. Bottom Line (in BPM/WF) – the value derived is well worth the cost/time of learning the toolset.”

“A big problem we have with SharePoint (other than a proliferation of isolated departmental installations) is that links to documents in our large document library break if we re-organize parts of the logical tree structure of our library, since references are only available as path names. In previous work at other companies with Xerox DocuShare product, I could use DocuShare’s permanent document IDs in our URL-based cross-document links and be free to reorganize our logical organization. [ This person went on to ask: ] Do you know of a solution to this problem with SharePoint? ” [Does anyone?]