What is SharePoint?

Jake at CodeStore asked the question: What Exactly is SharePoint?

Before you read this keep in mind I am a Lotus Notes developer and I like the product :-)

I've worked on two migration projects that have attempted to migrate Lotus Notes applications/databases to SharePoint 2007 and I can tell you SharePoint is not Lotus Notes.

It has some similarities to Lotus Notes in that SharePoint Lists are what we can views, items are what we call documents, permissions are what we call security, but that's kind of where it stops. I could write a very long list of functionality that it cannot do out of the box that Lotus Notes can.

If anything, SharePoint is more comparable to Quickr. It's good for document sharing but off the shelf it's not really a development platform by itself. If I want to start doing more challenging business requests in SharePoint then I might need to start using .ASP.net, visual studio, Excel Services, InfoPath and Forms Services, Enterprise Search, third party web parts. All of these work with SharePoint but none of which are in built into SharePoint.

Indeed, when you are migrating a Lotus Notes database to SharePoint you may get to the point where you might as well of just written it in ASP.net rather than trying to squeeze a square peg into a unsupported round hole.

I'll leave you with this link: http://furuknap.blogspot.com/2009/10/sharepoint-sucks-and-heres-why-part-1.html